INTERNET namespace: who needs it?

[Chris Lindblad <cjl%ai.mit.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Mon, 16 Oct 89 04:16:29 EDT
    From: barmar@think.com

       Date: Sun, 15 Oct 89 05:32 EDT
       From: cjl@AI.MIT.EDU (Chris Lindblad)

	 1.  NETI:ENSURE-DOMAIN-SERVICE-ENTRIES mistakenly tries to update the
	     INTERNET namespace for uninterned hosts with names like INTERNET|10.2.0.6
	     If you have an internet namespace, you just get these trash hosts in
	     your namespace, which is why this bug hadn't been discovered.
	     If you don't have an internet namespace, the function just blows out.

	 2.  Old world loads that believe in the existence of the INTERNET namespace
	     do not react in a civilized manner when the namespace server tells them
	     there isn't an Internet namespace.  The just immediately ask the
	     namespace server about the internet namespace again.  Just a couple of 
	     hosts behaving this way can bog down the namespace server with their
	     continuous requests.  We worked around this with a real kludge.  In
	     (flavor:method :server-top-level neti:namespace server) we sleep for 
	     10 seconds every time we get an object-not-found-in-search-list error
	     for the namespace "INTERNET".  This keeps the namespace server from
	     bogging down.

    There's a simple solution for both of these problems.  Instead of
    deleting the INTERNET namespace completely, just get rid of all the
    hosts in it.  That's what I did when I built a new world for our
    namespace server.

This isn't a solution.  It's another workaround.  I like my workaround better.