Usenet 1994 January/usenetsourcesnewsgroupsinfomagicjanuary1994.iso/sources/unix/volume8/smail2/part01/doc/Registry

Text File | 1987-02-16 | 11.1 KB | 228 lines

            UUCP Zone Registry
                 2/6/87

To use smail, or other software supporting domain addresses, you need
to have a domain name registered in the domain tree.  This name must be
unique in the world, and must be registered with the appropriate
registry.  Your domain must also have a forwarder from DDN (also
called ARPANET and MILNET).

If your primary network affiliation is with CSNET, BITNET, or DDN,
your organization may already have a domain name.  If you are not
on one of these networks, you can join the UUCP Zone to get your
organization name registered.

        History and Structure

The exact structure of the domain tree is evolving.  In 1984, the top
levels were network names (ARPA, CSNET, BITNET, UUCP, and so on) and
the second levels were hosts.  The problem with this structure is that
machines connected to several networks have several names, and it's
difficult for users to predict the address of someone without knowing
their network connections.

In 1986, the domain tree in the USA has three major top level domains:
COM for companies, EDU for educational institutions, and GOV for
government entities.  Three other top level names exist: MIL, NET, ORG,
but are somewhat specialized.  For the most part, countries other than
the USA are using the ISO 3166 2 letter abbreviation for their country
as a top level.

Examples include US for USA, AU for Australia, JP for Japan, NL for
Netherlands.  Abbreviations that are not ISO 3166 include CAN for
Canada and and UK for the United Kingdom.

One way of looking at the domain tree is that the top level is always
the country, where COM, EDU, and GOV are three pretend "countries" all
located in the USA.  (This isn't quite strictly true, since some Canadian
organizations are registering under EDU or COM, intending to also register
under CAN later.)

The second level is generally the name of the organization, using the
shortest possible abbreviation that is clear and unique, thus ATT, DEC,
IBM, HP, etc.  The choice of exact name is up to the organization, and
longer names, such as Berkeley.EDU or Tektronix.COM are perfectly
acceptable.  Just remember that people must type the name, as well as
see it displayed.

Not all countries use the second level for the organization.  In
particular, Australia and Britain have set up second level domains
AC.UK and OZ.AU for their academic communities, and put the
organization at the third level.

The third and subsequent levels, if used, should be organizational
units within the organization.  Try to keep the number of levels to a
minimum, since people have to type the names.  More than four total
levels (country, org, ou1, and ou2) should rarely be needed.  The
actual organizational units to be used are up to you, for example, they
might be departments, or they might be machine names.  For example,
Stargate has names like Base.Stargate.COM, where COM means a company,
Stargate is the organization (company) name, and Base is the name of
the machine within Stargate.  A larger example:  AT&T is using names
like cbpavo.MIS.OH.ATT.COM, where COM means AT&T is a company, ATT is
the organization, OH means Ohio, MIS stands for Medical Information
Systems, and cbpavo is a computer in the MIS project.

A "zone" is a registry of domains kept by a particular organization.  A
zone registry is "authoritative", that is, the master copy of the
registry is kept by the zone organization, and this copy is, by
definition, always up-to-date.  Copies of this registry may be
distributed to other places and kept in caches, but these caches are
not authoritative because they may be out of date.  An authoritative
answer is required for certain decisions, such as "this mail cannot be
delivered because there is no such domain", or "the name you have
chosen is available and is now assigned uniquely to you."

In the USA, there are currently four zones: DDN (formerly called the
ARPANET), CSNET, BITNET, and UUCP.  These zones all share the top level
domains COM, EDU, GOV, etc.  The top level domains are administered by
the DDN (Defense Data Network) NIC (Network Information Center) at SRI
(SRI, Inc, formerly Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park, CA.)
The CSNET, BITNET, and UUCP registries serve as a go-between to avoid
swamping the NIC with individual registrations.  It is possible for an
organization to be members of more than one of these networks, in which
case they register with each network, using the same name on all
networks.

The UUCP Project keeps a registry of members of the UUCP Zone.  This
registry is different than the UUCP map, although the registry is posted
with the UUCP map.  The UUCP Zone registry consists only of organizations
which are members of the UUCP Zone.  To become a member, it is
necessary to explicitly join, just as one joins CSNET or BITNET.  Just
being reachable via a bang path does not imply membership, nor does
appearance in the UUCP map.

To join the UUCP Zone, it is necessary to apply for membership.  This
involves paying low annual membership dues to the project, deciding how to
structure your domain and where to put it into the global domain tree,
installing software such as smail, finding a forwarder, and doing some
electronic paperwork.  Please contact us at one of these addresses and
ask for the membership kit; it will contain up-to-date information on
joining, including the fee structure, information about forwarders,
information about 3rd level domain "parks", and forms to fill out.

See the "Contact Information" below for instructions to contact us;
please use the "query" address for the initial query.

        Organizational Registry

If you are registering your organization in the UUCP zone, you are in
effect creating another zone registry for your organization.  Any
subdomains of your organizational domain must be registered with you.
(You need not keep us informed of all your subdomains, just the gateways.)

For the time being, unless you are ready to start organizing the machines
in your organization, don't worry about this.  You can just set things up
to handle your one machine (or more if you like).  Just keep in mind that
your machine is but one machine in your organization, so you should be
planning to have an address like [e-mail] (where "fred" is
a login name on machine "compsci" owned by organization "BigCorp") rather
than [e-mail].

For example, if you are the first host in the University of North Dakota to
join, you are creating a subdomain UND.EDU (for example.)  Your host might
have a name like undvax.UND.EDU.  When other machines are joined in later,
they will also register under UND.EDU, for example, cs3b20.UND.EDU.
All subdomains of UND (this may mean all hosts in the UND domain) are
registered with the UND.EDU registry.  Unless you create a campus organization
specifically to run this registry, this means you are the UND.EDU registry.
It is your job to keep track of everybody in the registry, hand out names
for subdomains, make sure there are no duplicates (you have to make sure there
aren't two machines called cs3b2.UND.EDU, for example) and know who to
contact if a problem arises.  You have created the UND Zone, which is
similar to the UUCP Zone, but one level further down in the heirarchy.

At some point, you may decide that you want more layers of subdomains in
your zone.  For example, if the CS, Math, and Stat departments at UND all
want to manage their own zones, you might use names like vax.CS.UND.EDU,
3b20.Math.UND.EDU, and so on.  The UND Zone has delegated its naming
authority to the CS Zone, the Math Zone, and so on.  The root delegates
to COM, COM delegates to UUCP, UUCP delegates to UND, UND delegates to CS.

Note that the names are given in upper or mixed case, but the exact
case doesn't matter, since the software ignores it.  We recommend that
you choose your capitalization to look nice when printed.

Note also that "vax", "3b20", and the like are terrible host names,
because sooner or later you'll have more than one vax, or more than
one 3b20, and the names will be confusing.  We recommend organizational
names, based on the department or project the machine is used for.
Of course, in order to keep the names reasonably short and to avoid
duplicating names in the heirarchy, some compromise will be needed.
For example, csvax.CS.UND.EDU is redundant, but RISC.CS.UND.EDU might
be a good name for the computer used by the RISC project in the CS
department.

        Notes:

Organizations are encouraged to eventually support two kinds of electronic
mail addresses:

(1) Login name on machine: a string which is understood on a particular
    machine, combined with a fully qualified domain name of a machine.
    The string is often, although not always, a login name.
    Example:
    [e-mail]

(2) Personal name in organization: a string which is the name of a person,
    understood by all gateway machines.
    Example:
    [e-mail]
    This allows mail to be sent without knowing the full address
    of the recipient, only their name and company.  Implementations
    should be as forgiving as possible of errors in the personal name.
    For example, if possible, as many of the following as possible
    should be accepted:
    [e-mail]    (ignore case)
    [e-mail]    (accept initials)
    [e-mail]    (don't require initials)
    [e-mail]
    [e-mail]    (if not ambiguous)
    [e-mail]        (if not ambiguous)
    [e-mail]    (allow generational qualifier)

However, it's perfectly fine to just support just one style.
Since the login name style (1) is easy to support, you may prefer to
just handle that one, especially at first.  Style (1) is by far the
most commonly used method as this is written.

Please note that you should support both RFC 976 and the documents
it refers to, in particular RFC 822 and RFC 920.  This means, for
example:

(a) The name "postmaster" on all machines visible to the outside
    should be forwarded to the technical contact.  This can be
    easily done with an alias in /usr/lib/aliases, if your site
    runs sendmail or smail 2.0.  Please be sure to also support
    Postmaster, PostMaster, and POSTMASTER, if you use sendmail.

(b) Your machine should not alter valid RFC 822 headers, such as
    From:, of mail it generates or forwards.  Many machines running
    sendmail have a bug which adds uucpname! to the front of such
    addresses.  Installing smail will fix the bug, because mail
    passed through the machine is not passed through sendmail.
    We hope to make a fix to sendmail available, also, at a
    later date.

        Contact Information

We strongly encourage electronic mail for queries, updates, and
applications.  This cuts down on our costs, and we can pass those
savings along to you.  We currently do not have a telephone number
for queries, although we hope to have one in the near future.  If
you are unable to send and receive electronic mail, you will have
to wait until we are prepared for telephone calls or postal mail.

For queries:    [e-mail]        cbosgd!stargate!uucp-query

For updates:    [e-mail]        cbosgd!stargate!uucpmap

For problems:    [e-mail]    cbosgd!stargate!uucp-problem

To register:    [e-mail]        cbosgd!stargate!registry

UUCP host "stargate" can also be reached via uiucdcs or cbatt.
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#@(#)Registry    2.1 smail 12/14/86
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