UUCP Zone Registry 12/6/86 To use smail, or other software supporting domain addresses, you need to have a domain name registered in the domain tree. This name must be unique in the world, and must be registered with the appropriate registry. You also need to be in a domain that has a forwarder from the ARPANET. The exact structure of the domain tree is evolving. In 1984, the top levels were network names (ARPA, CSNET, BITNET, UUCP, and so on) and the second levels were hosts. The problem with this structure is that machines connected to several networks have several names, and it's difficult for users to predict the address of someone without knowing their network connections. In 1986, the domain tree in the USA has three major top level domains: COM for companies, EDU for educational institutions, and GOV for government entities. Three other top level names exist: MIL, NET, ORG, but are somewhat specialized. For the most part, countries other than the USA are using the ISO 3166 2 letter abbreviation for their country as a top level. Examples include US for USA, AU for Australia, JP for Japan, NL for Netherlands. Abbreviations that are not ISO 3166 include CAN for Canada and and UK for the United Kingdom. One way of looking at the domain tree is that the top level is always the country, where COM, EDU, and GOV are three pretend "countries" all located in the USA. (This isn't quite strictly true, since some Canadian organizations are registering under EDU or COM, intending to also register under CAN later.) The second level is generally the name of the organization, using the shortest possible abbreviation that is clear and unique, thus ATT, DEC, IBM, HP, etc. The choice of exact name is up to the organization, and longer names, such as Berkeley.EDU or Tektronix.COM are perfectly acceptable. Just remember that people must type the name, as well as see it displayed. Not all countries use the second level for the organization. In particular, Australia and Britain have set up second level domains AC.UK and OZ.AU for their academic communities, and put the organization at the third level. The third and subsequent levels, if used, should be organizational units within the organization. Try to keep the number of levels to a minimum, since people have to type the names. More than four total levels (country, org, ou1, and ou2) should rarely be needed. The actual organizational units to be used are up to you, for example, they might be departments, or they might be machine names. For example, Stargate has names like Base.Stargate.COM, where COM means a company, Stargate is the organization (company) name, and Base is the name of the machine within Stargate. A larger example: AT&T is using names like cbpavo.MIS.OH.ATT.COM, where COM means AT&T is a company, ATT is the organization, OH means Ohio, MIS stands for Medical Information Systems, and cbpavo is a computer in the MIS project. A "zone" is a registry of domains kept by a particular organization. A zone registry is "authoritative", that is, the master copy of the registry is kept by the zone organization, and this copy is, by definition, always up-to-date. Copies of this registry may be distributed to other places and kept in caches, but these caches are not authoritative because they may be out of date. An authoritative answer is required for certain decisions, such as "this mail cannot be delivered because there is no such domain", or "the name you have chosen is available and is now assigned uniquely to you." In the USA, there are currently four zones: DDN (formerly called the ARPANET), CSNET, BITNET, and UUCP. These zones all share the top level domains COM, EDU, GOV, etc. The top level domains are administered by the DDN (Defense Data Network) NIC (Network Information Center) at SRI (SRI, Inc, formerly Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park, CA.) The CSNET, BITNET, and UUCP registries serve as a go-between to avoid swamping the NIC with individual registrations. It is possible for an organization to be members of more than one of these networks, in which case they register with each network, using the same name on all networks. The UUCP Project keeps a registry of members of the UUCP Zone. This registry is different than the UUCP map, although the registry is posted with the UUCP map. The UUCP Zone registry consists only of organizations which are members of the UUCP Zone. To become a member, it is necessary to explicitly join, just as one joins CSNET or BITNET. Just being reachable via a bang path does not imply membership, nor does appearance in the UUCP map. To join the UUCP Zone, it is necessary to apply for membership. This will involve paying a small membership fee to the project, deciding how to structure your domain and where to put it into the global domain tree, installing software such as smail, finding a forwarder, and doing some electronic paperwork. Please contact us at one of these addresses and ask for the membership kit; it will contain up-to-date information on joining, including the fee structure, information about forwarders, information about 3rd level domain "parks", and forms to fill out. See the "Contact Information" below for instructions to contact us; please use the "query" address for the initial query. Organizational Registry If you are registering your organization in the UUCP zone, you are in effect creating another zone registry for your organization. Any subdomains of your organizational domain must be registered with you. (You need not keep us informed of all your subdomains, just the gateways.) For the time being, unless you are ready to start organizing the machines in your organization, don't worry about this. You can just set things up to handle your one machine (or more if you like). Just keep in mind that your machine is but one machine in your organization, so you should be planning to have an address like fred@compsci.BigCorp.COM (where "fred" is a login name on machine "compsci" owned by organization "BigCorp") rather than fred@BigCorp.COM. For example, if you are the first host in the University of North Dakota to join, you are creating a subdomain UND.EDU (for example.) Your host might have a name like undvax.UND.EDU. When other machines are joined in later, they will also register under UND.EDU, for example, cs3b20.UND.EDU. All subdomains of UND (this may mean all hosts in the UND domain) are registered with the UND.EDU registry. Unless you create a campus organization specifically to run this registry, this means you are the UND.EDU registry. It is your job to keep track of everybody in the registry, hand out names for subdomains, make sure there are no duplicates (you have to make sure there aren't two machines called cs3b2.UND.EDU, for example) and know who to contact if a problem arises. You have created the UND Zone, which is similar to the UUCP Zone, but one level further down in the heirarchy. At some point, you may decide that you want more layers of subdomains in your zone. For example, if the CS, Math, and Stat departments at UND all want to manage their own zones, you might use names like vax.CS.UND.EDU, u3b20.Math.UND.EDU, and so on. The UND Zone has delegated its naming authority to the CS Zone, the Math Zone, and so on. The root delegates to COM, COM delegates to UUCP, UUCP delegates to UND, UND delegates to CS. Note that the names are given in upper or mixed case, but the exact case doesn't matter, since the software ignores it. We recommend that you choose your capitalization to look nice when printed. Note also that "vax", "u3b20", and the like are terrible host names, because sooner or later you'll have more than one vax, or more than one 3b20, and the names will be confusing. We recommend organizational names, based on the department or project the machine is used for. Of course, in order to keep the names reasonably short and to avoid duplicating names in the heirarchy, some compromise will be needed. For example, csvax.CS.UND.EDU is redundant, but RISC.CS.UND.EDU might be a good name for the computer used by the RISC project in the CS department. Notes: Organizations are encouraged to eventually support two kinds of electronic mail addresses: (1) Login name on machine: a string which is understood on a particular machine, combined with a fully qualified domain name of a machine. The string is often, although not always, a login name. Example: mrh@cbosgd.ATT.COM (2) Personal name in organization: a string which is the name of a person, understood by all gateway machines. Example: Mark.R.Horton@ATT.COM This allows mail to be sent without knowing the full address of the recipient, only their name and company. Implementations should be as forgiving as possible of errors in the personal name. For example, if possible, as many of the following as possible should be accepted: mark.r.horton@att.com (ignore case) m.r.horton@ATT.COM (accept initials) mark.horton@ATT.COM (don't require initials) mark.randolph.horton@ATT.COM m.horton@ATT.COM (if not ambiguous) horton@ATT.COM (if not ambiguous) mark.horton.sr@ATT.COM (allow generational qualifier) However, it's perfectly fine to just support just one style. Since the login name style (1) is easy to support, you may prefer to just handle that one, especially at first. Style (1) is by far the most commonly used method as this is written. Please note that you should support both RFC 976 and the documents it refers to, in particular RFC 822 and RFC 920. This means, for example: (a) The name "postmaster" on all machines visible to the outside should be forwarded to the technical contact. This can be easily done with an alias in /usr/lib/aliases, if your site runs sendmail or smail 2.0. Please be sure to also support Postmaster, PostMaster, and POSTMASTER, if you use sendmail. (b) Your machine should not alter valid RFC 822 headers, such as From:, of mail it generates or forwards. Many machines running sendmail have a bug which adds uucpname! to the front of such addresses. Installing smail will fix the bug, because mail passed through the machine is not passed through sendmail. We hope to make a fix to sendmail available, also, at a later date. Contact Information We strongly encourage electronic mail for queries, updates, and applications. This cuts down on our costs, and we can pass those savings along to you. We currently do not have a telephone number for queries, although we hope to have one in the near future. If you are unable to send and receive electronic mail, you will have to wait until we are prepared for telephone calls or postal mail. For queries: uucp-query@Stargate.COM cbosgd!stargate!uucp-query For updates: uucpmap@Stargate.COM cbosgd!stargate!uucpmap For problems: uucp-problem@Stargate.COM cbosgd!stargate!uucp-problem To register: registry@Stargate.COM cbosgd!stargate!registry Billing/money: billing@Stargate.COM cbosgd!stargate!billing