Mail, Domain Names, NSLUG, and 7.2 and 8.0, and the coming ice age in Hell.

[Barry Margolin <barmar@think.com>]

    Date: Tue, 15 Dec 87 18:31 PST
    From: Jerry Bakin <Jerry@marlowe.inference.dialnet.symbolics.com>

	Date: Tue, 15 Dec 87 09:21 EST
	From: Daniel L. Weinreb <DLW@ALDERAAN.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

	Resolution of "domain" names in Arpanet mail, names such as
	"symbolics.com", don't work well anywhere on the Arpanet as far as I
	know.

    Kind of true, of course, Symbolics has not lifted an eyebrow to make
    things any easier:
...
    Now, a mistake is a mistake, but what really is upsetting is how
    Symbolics has reacted to this problem.

Well, I don't know much about the background that Jerry talked about,
but I know that Symbolics has not been ignoring this problem.  I am on
the NAMEDROPPERS mailing list, which is used for discussion of the
domain name system, and almost all the activity over the last couple of
months has been Dave Plummer of Symbolics trying to get some straight
answers about aspects of the domain system that are either unspecified,
ambiguous, or downright nonunderstandable in the domain specification.
 From context it appears that he is trying to implement a central site
resolver, but the protocol spec doesn't make this very easy, especially
when he wants to make it fit in with the namespace system's view of the
world.

At our site we use a simple solution: we set ZWEI:*MAIL-NETWORK-HOST* to
a Unix host, and let it deal with it.

                                                barmar