The latest

[Valdis.Kletnieks at VT.EDU]

On Wed, 25 Jun 1997 13:14:19 MDT, Jawaid Bazyar said:
> At 01:08 PM 6/25/97 +0100, Jeff Williams wrote:
> >  The relationship is obvious.
> 
> Other than the fact that a domain name is mapped to an IP address (but
> could just as easily be mapped to something else..), how are they
> "irrevocably related"? If this is all you're talking about, please explain

You almost, but not quite, hit the crux of the matter here.  There's a
LOT of domains that consist of essentially just an SOA record, some NS
entries  pointing at an ISP's  nameservers, and a wildcard MX pointing
at  the  ISP's mail   hub.  So,  as   you put it,  they're  "mapped to
something else".

Given the existence of these, the "relationship is obvious" is not quite
as obviousas Mr Williams would have us believe.  There's machines with
more than one logical hostname.  There's machines with IP addresses and
no hostname (consider a PC on a subnet, using an IP address that is not
in the nameserver, and has no PTR record).

Noel Chiappa was pushing for the addition of *another* level of indirection
between DNS names and IP addresses, to be called "endpoints".  I'm almost
afraid to think what this discussion would look like if he had suceeded...

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Senior Engineer
				Virginia Tech


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