The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.

Domain Names

Over the past few months, the Internet community has been moving towards domain based machine naming. The Internet is a set of interconnected machines and local area networks, such as the ECN, running a common communications protocol known as TCP/IP. Purdue is one of many, many sites on the Internet. With the recent growth of the Internet, it has become impractical to keep track of all machines by simple unique names. Instead, the name space has been re-organized into a hierarchy of names. The "tops" of these hierarchies are broad classifications such as "edu" for educational institutions, "gov" for governmental organizations, and "com" for commercial enterprises. Purdue University is a sub-hierarchy called "purdue" under the "edu" tree. Purdue is further divided along organizational boundaries into sub-classifications such as "cc" (Computing Center), "cs" (Computer Science), and "ecn" (Engineering Computer Network). In each organization, normal "shorthand" machine names are used to distinguish between machines. A completely qualified "domain" machine name is constructed left to right with the machine name followed by the list of hierarchies that it is found in. Each component of the name is separated with a period. Examples of machine names following this protocal might look like:

          mb.ecn.purdue.edu
          j.cc.purdue.edu
          arthur.cs.purdue.edu
          decwrl.dec.com
          seismo.css.gov

The Internet community is still in the process of converting over to this new naming scheme. Users who send mail to off campus Internet sites may find the name of the target host changing or even encounter temporary disruptions in their mail delivery. Although ECN staff will make every possible effort to help users cope with changes caused by domain naming, we have no method of correcting problems with software at other Internet sites.

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