[PLUG] Naming RFC 1918 networks...

Russell Johnson russ at dimstar.net
Sat Aug 7 03:07:32 UTC 2010


On Aug 6, 2010, at 7:47 PM, Someone wrote:

> On Fri, 2010-08-06 at 19:32 -0700, wes wrote:
>> In what way is a non-public TLD dangerous? BTW, the standard for that is to
>> use .local rather than .foo.
> 
> For how long will .local be understood to be private?  What guarantees
> are there?  Why not .pri or .private or .lan or .res or .reserved
> or .home?  The danger is that people do try to use what are supposed to
> be reserved private TLDs whether they purchase the right to or not from
> IANA.

You don't 'purchase the right to use' any TLD. The TLDs are .com, .net, .info, etc.

The 'danger' you speak of could be said of ANY domain name. If someone is using a domain name they do not have the authority to use, they are breaking things for themselves, and will quickly learn this can't be done long term. 

> Back to my idea, what if 10 different organizations want to have
> http://www.foo.bar as their globally unique domain name?  No, foo.bar is
> not a good generic name, but please ignore that.

Obviously it would not work, which is why we have RFC's that state it can't be done, and the current holder of the domain name is the only authority. If someone just decided to put a DNS server on the net that serves up a zone for microsoft.com, it would mostly be ignored as not authoritative.

I think you are looking for issues where there are none.  

> Just because there are a lot of possibilities for strings that are 255
> characters or so long, not all of them are desirable to name a web site.
> In fact, there are a few names that potentially a lot of people want to
> use.  I don't know of any official RFC that says that .local is a
> private TLD.  I prefer a three letter TLD for a private network where
> local just isn't three letters.

I didn't find one either. I see where Apple may be working on one. 

What's to stop you from registering your own domain name? If it's a private web server, we don't care what you use. You could define the foo.bar domain and make www.foo.bar, Unless you are not using your own DNS server as your primary, and you or someone else has that name defined publicly, it won't affect anyone else at all. 

I still think you are looking for issues where there are none. 

Russ


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