🚀 go-pugleaf

There's some misinformation running around in this topic thread ..

yes there's lots of places not directly on the internet which
have domain names.  But -- assuming they have a proper right
to use the domain name -- it's legit.  Even those sites in england
are legit, because .uk was assigned to some authority in england
by the folk at SRI-NIC.

The domain space *IS* rooted, but isn't centrally managed.  The
UK folk have their piece just as everybody else does.





Something I've heard said a lot recently is along the lines that
it's somehow evil to have mailers which believe they know more about
routing than the sender does.

I wonder ... how do you know the sender knows *ANYTHING* about routing?
In my environment, most of the users don't care a whit about UUCP
routing, or any other routing style at that.  They just want to use
a simple addressing style, user@place is fine, and send it off.
So I configure the mailer here to use pathalias to generate a list
of routes and tell people to specify user@host.uucp, but *they*
don't know anything.

It would please me greatly if there were some better way that I could
tell my mailer to get mail to somewhere else.  Even though us map maintainers
do a pretty good job at map maintaining, we're not perfect...  Lots
of links are dead/bad/flaky, and just change all the time anyway.

This system of routing is *inherently* incapable of handling the
number of systems attached to it.  No person can keep a map of
the network, in its current state, in his/her head.




An interesting alternative routing system is vaguely related to
something that AT&T does internally.

That is, "guidepost" routing system.

In guidepost routing, a message passing through the network has
attached to it some hints about where it's supposed to go.  It's
rather like how people find their way around in the real world,
go down main street until you see the green house with chartreuse
shutters then turn left ...

Everybody's familiar with the idea that you can send mail to
att!some-machine!some-user and have it get there, even though
some-machine may be a couple hops away.  And 'att' isn't just
one machine, it's many machines spread all over the country.
Well, internally they've taken that farther, with (at least)
an 'arpa' "machine" through which you route mail to send it
out to the TCP/IP network.

At a first guess I think, if "we" adopted a system like that we
could set up names for every city or (other geographical area)
and put out addresses like

	lex.ky.us!davids!david
	dal.tx.us!killer!wisner
	chi.il.us!chinet!...

	chi.il.us!bay.ca.us!...

It's similar to the old system of listing your address relative
to some well known site ...



It's silly that the current system encourages that all sites
be listed in the official maps...  It makes the maps so unweildy, see,
and isn't necessary for 80-90% of the cases.

-- 
<- David Herron; an MMDF guy                              <david@ms.uky.edu>
<- ska: David le casse\*'      {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<-
<- WARNING: Hunting season is now open in West Virginia!