18 Jul
2016
18 Jul
'16
8:46 p.m.
When we were running the UUCP Zone, 3Com wanted to register 3com.com
through us. ISI balked at it, saying the RFC said domains had to start
with a letter. It turned out the original code decided if it was an IP
address or a domain name by looking at whether the first character was a
letter or digit. We pushed back, it was allowed, and the code (and
eventually RFC) was fixed. UUCP, of course, didn't have that issue.
Mary Ann
On 07/18/2016 07:35 AM, Norman Wilson wrote:
While I was there, senior management bought a Cray X-MP/24 for
the research group. (Thank you for using AT&T.) Since it too
was accessible via Datakit (using a custom hardware interface
built by Alan Kaplan, but that's another story), it had to have
a hostname. It was either Dave or Rob, I forget which, who
suggested 3k, because (a) it was a supercomputer, so `big bang'
seemed to fit; (b) it was Arno Penzias, then VP for Research,
who got us the money, so `big bang' and 3K radiation seemed
even more appropriate; and, most important, (c) it was fun to
see whether a hostname beginning with a digit broke anything.
So far as I recall, nothing broke. Some people who were
involved with TCP/IP networking at the labs were frightened
about it; I don't remember whether that Cray was ever connected
to an IP network so I don't know whether anything went wrong
there. Of course such names are not a problem today, but
in those long-lost days when nobody worried much about buffer
overflows either, such bugs were much more common. Weren't they?
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON