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- From: bryan@notorious.rs.itd.umich.edu (Bryan Beecher)
- Newsgroups: mi.misc,mi.news
- Subject: Re: MI.ORG
- Date: 25 Jan 1993 17:13:20 GMT
- Organization: University of Michigan
- Lines: 72
- Distribution: mi
- Message-ID: <1k173gINNmt9@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: notorious.rs.itd.umich.edu
- Originator: bryan@notorious.rs.itd.umich.edu
-
- In article <1993Jan24.193507.24344@rotag.mi.org> kevin@rotag.mi.org (Kevin Darcy
- ) writes:
- >
- >1) The names are too long, and give folks bogus impressions when they get
- > out of date, e.g. if my address is kevin@rotag.ann-arbor.mi.us (blech!),
- > and I move to Royal Oak, or wherever, net.people will still ASSUME I'm in
- > Ann Arbor, unless or until a change is made in the nameservice. I'm
- > not a fan of propagating bogus information, even if it's relatively
- > innocuous bogus information. The world is already a pretty complex place
- > without adding to the "information clutter" problem.
-
- The names are definitely longer. No doubt about that.
-
- Is the "bogus information" problem really an issue? When one moves, there's
- a lot of places where your new address has to get recorded. This seems to
- add one more. Worrying about net.people making assumptions about the city
- you live in hardly seems to be a show-stopper.
-
- >2) Mi.us doesn't have local control over nameservice. The administrators in
- > CA, from all reports, seem to be doing a good job now, but who's to say
- > that couldn't change in an instant, with a flurry of bureaucratic org-chart
-
- > and/or budget-priority changes?
- >
- >
- >2a) The .us folks seem to have a STRONG bias against wildcard MX'es. Even
- > stronger, if that's possible, than mi.org's traditional bias. Without
- > local control, what's to stop them outlawing wildcard MX's completely,
- > thus depriving non-IP-connected sites of a valuable mail routing tool?
-
- Why is local control any better than ISI control? Most of this stuff gets
- done via e-mail. And since I said I could act as a front-end, I could also
- take phone calls, and send mail on people's behalf. I think the U-M Info
- Tech Div is a lot more liable to go through any changes (read the papers)
- than ISI.
-
- >3) What about bona fide "org"s, i.e. non-profits? They don't really belong in
- > mi.us, do they? And according to the RFC's I've seen, you're not really
- > supposed to register a second-level domain if you have less than 50 nodes
- > in it. Mi.org has almost 50 nodes, but a small non-profit with, say, half
- > a dozen nodes, would clearly be in violation of that guideline if they
- > tried to register a second-level .org domain. Lots of folks ignore those
- > guidelines, true, but again, why contribute to the problem?
- >
- >3a) Where is the fine line drawn between individuals and non-profits, anyway?
- > We have pretty much jettisoned the 501(c)(3) yardstick, right, so if I
- > were to, for example, open up my whopping three-node bedroom network to
- > select friends and relatives, as a kind of informal, non-profit "club",
- > should I be in .org or .us? Mi.org covers both usage classes right now.
-
- This is not a problem. There are A LOT of places without 50 hosts that have
- a domain. People who want their own domain should continue to register them
- in US or ORG or wherever they want it.
-
- >4) It's not broken, and transition would be a minor pain in the ass.
-
- MI.ORG is not broken, true. Moving towards a standard namespace and removing
- the reliance upon the kindness of strangers is a good thing, IMHO. There's no
- reason not to begin a move soon, keeping MI.ORG around for, say, a year so
- no one loses any mail.
-
- >If I didn't have a financial matter pending resolution for the next few
- >months, I'd get my home network IP-connected right now and run the silly
- >nameservice myself, if no-one else wanted to...
-
- Let me repeat that running the MI.ORG domain is not a problem for me or U-M,
- and that I have no plans to just shut things off or anything insane like that.
- My interest is looking at this situation pro-actively, so that the system that
- is left in place can continue into the future indefinitely.
- --
- Bryan Beecher, U-M Information Technology Division (+1 313 747 4050)
- Domain: Bryan.Beecher@umich.edu Path: ..!uunet!destroyer!bryan
-