🚀 go-pugleaf

In response to: pcelis@watdaisy <7335@watdaisy.UUCP>
>In Article 484 of net.mail.headers:
>>
>>>>I think that is important that anyone who is tempted to jump into the
>>>>domain discussion consider that what we really want is a way to name
>>>>hosts *independent* of their physical location or physical network
>>>>address, ...
>>
>>In <2329@icarus.fluke.UUCP> joe@fluke attempts to reply:
>>>When is everyone going to realize that the point of domains is to separate
>>>the physical addressing from the naming?
>>
>>>Domain names have absolutely nothing to do with routing.  
>
>Once again. What does a domain scheme to NAME a host has to do with
>the ROUTE used to send messages to that host?

Domain naming schemes relate to routing as follows:  If you don't know
how to route a message directly, you FORWARD the message to someone that
you hope will know better.  In general this means a server for the given
domain.  sysa.nj.UUCP could pass a message for sysb.ca.UUCP to any known
system in the ca.UUCP sub-domain.  If it doesn't know of any, it can pass
it on to a "smarter" host in nj.UUCP or in UUCP (such as linus, decvax, ...).

The reasons: (1) No host should *have* to know where every other host in
UUCP resides.  The routing tables would be rather large.  Micros and minis
should pass messages on to midis or mainframes which know better.
(2) Connections change.  What is a good route today may not be next week.
If the message gets *closer* at each hop that's good enough.

The problem lies in making sure that you are really getting closer.  That
is, that the host you forward to has a *better* idea (or at least equally
good) of where to pass the message to.  This way, routing can be done just
one hop at a time.

It doesn't matter whether you use geographic regions, corporate affiliations,
or any other scheme to create the subdomains.  Everyone shouldn't have to
know the route to everybody else and those that don't should use the domain
structures for partial routing.
-- 
jonah	(Jeff Lee @ Dept. of Comp. Sci., The University of Western Ontario)
UUCP:   ...!decvax!{utzoo|watmath}!deepthot!jonah
MLNET:  jonah@deepthot.UWO