🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1gh2pdINNj8g@gaia.ucs.orst.edu> stanley@skyking.OCE.ORST.EDU (John Stanley) writes:
>Neither of these puts me in charge of my little section of the DNS. They
>put me in contact with someone else, who is in charge of my little
>section. Not the same thing.

And from what you're saying, you don't really want to be in charge of
your own little section of the DNS because it's too much trouble to do
correctly.

So, register in the .US domain, where there are nice people at ISI to
take care of the nitty-gritty details for you.

>> JS> With the DNS, it is easy to poke incorrect data into the database and
>> JS> *poof* EVERYONE is using bogus data. 

With the UUCP maps, it's just as easy to poke the incorrect data into
the database, except once it's in there it becomes a lot more
difficult to remove.  How many sites out there are still using
outdated versions of the maps?

The UUCP maps are a lot less deterministic when it comes to routing.
If I want to make sure that all mail for machine A gets sent through
machine B, where machine A talks to around 15 different sites, I have
to play games with the costs in machine B's map or in the maps of all
the other sites machine A talks to.  And if one of them puts too low
of a cost for machine A in their map, the mail will get misrouted for
the next month.

>Sigh. You must keep something that tells you who a root nameserver is.
>That is, indeed, keeping some information about someone.

Okay, so the root nameservers is "someone".  I still think it's a lot
more reliable and efficient to store 32 bits of information on each of
a dozen machines -- especially when that data changes very rarely --
than it is to store 500 bytes or so of data on each of thousands of
hosts.

>if you wish.  It is still not a reasonable expectation for every UUCP
>site to have an MX record, whether it is its own or part of a
>wildcard.

I disagree.  Registering in the .US domain is no more difficult than
registering in the UUCP maps, and you won't even have to find another
machine to connect to if you're already talking to an
Internet-connected machine who is willing to forward mail for you.  If
you don't feel like doing that you can always pay UUNET or MSEN $35 to
register your domain for you.

-- 
Marc Unangst, N8VRH         | "Of course, in order to understand this you
mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us   |  have to remember that the nucleus of the atom
                            |  is squishy."
                            |    -W. Scheider, from a Physics lecture