UUCP Zone Membership Application Instructions Please fill out the "UUCP Zone Membership Application" form and electronically mail it to the UUCP Domain Registrar (registry@Stargate.COM) This document describes the form and how to fill it out. We recommend that you edit the form, which is filled out as an example, and change the information as appropriate for your domain. This form is the appropriate form if you are applying for a 2nd level domain under COM, EDU, GOV, MIL, NET, or ORG. If you are applying for a 3rd level domain, you should check with the 2nd level domain under which you are applying for instructions. If you are applying for a top level domain (this option is only available to countries) check with us directly. 1) The name of the domain applied for. This will be of the form "yourorg.top", where "top" is one of EDU, COM, GOV, MIL, NET, or ORG. These names are intended for organizations in the USA, although organizations outside the USA (especially Canada) may choose to register under one of these domains as well, if they are easily reached via ordinary UUCP paths from well known USA hosts. The top level domains are intended as follows: EDU Educational institutions, especially universities and colleges, but other schools also belong here. COM Companies, both for-profit and non-profit. Large companies and one-person consulting companies are allowed here, although small companies may prefer to use a less expensive "park" 3rd level domain. GOV Government entities, including federal, state, and local governments, but not military entities. MIL Military entities. Since most military domains are able to directly connect to DDN, special permission from the NIC may be required for a UUCP MIL domain. Check with the NIC at 800-235-3155 first. NET Variously interpreted as the home for machines owned by network information centers (such as CSNET's relay and service hosts), physical network addresses, or a "miscellaneous catchall". This domain is not fully understood yet. ORG Variously interpreted as a home for organizations to parcel out 3rd level domains to their members, or for nonprofit corporations. This domain is not fully understood yet. "yourorg" is the name of your 2nd level domain. The name of the 2nd level domain may be up to 12 characters. This is the name that will be used in tables and lists associating the domain and the domain server addresses. [While domain names can technically be quite long (programmers beware), shorter names are easier for people to cope with.] You may mix upper and lower case, or use all upper or all lower case. Software will ignore case, and most users will probably type all lower or all upper case, depending on their terminals. You should capitalize it as you wish it to appear in machine generated lists, such as the return address generated in your outgoing electronic mail. Hyphens to separate words are recommended. Legal characters are letters, digits, and the hyphen, and upper and lower case are considered the same. Names must begin with a letter, and cannot end in a hyphen. The name must be unique in its domain; thus it is not possible for Ohio State and Oregon State to both choose OSU.EDU, but it is possible for Times Mirror Corporation to choose TMC.COM while the Texas Medical Center chooses TMC.EDU (watch out for possible human confusion, however.) For example: > Alpha-Beta.EDU Hyphenated and spelled out > Technical.COM Full name spelled out > ABU.EDU Acronym in upper case. > HighTech.COM Not recommended unless hyphen is added, because sometimes case distinctions are lost, and it can become hightech.com. > Stargate.COM Stargate is one word. 2) Forwarder. Having a forwarder is now required, that is, there must be a way for mail from DDN to reach you. A forwarder is a host which is on both DDN and UUCP, which will accept mail from DDN addressed to your domain, and forward it via UUCP to you. Special software is required to do this; so it is not possible for a random UNIX host on both networks to serve as your forwarder unless they install software that understand that a name ending in .COM or .EDU is not necessarily on DDN. See the list of forwarders for possible contacts. If your host is already on DDN, you should list your own host here (if you have more than one, list your main gateway onto DDN.) If your domain is already registered on CSNET, and you consider your primary affiliation to be with CSNET, you should list RELAY.CS.NET as your forwarder. Procedures for BITNET are not yet determined. If you are a 3rd level domain park member, you will use the park's forwarder instead of setting up your own separate forwarder. The intent is that you only need a forwarder if your primary network is UUCP. (The "primary network" is the one via which mail from DDN is delivered to you, if you are on more than one network, you should choose which network to use for this.) For example: > Foo.Bar.EDU has agreed to be our forwarder. DO NOT CHANGE THE NEXT LINE. This line indicates to the NIC that mail to your COM domain should be handed off to the 3 nameservers for UUCP: seismo.css.gov, harvard.harvard.edu, and brl.arpa. It does not refer to nameservers on your local UUCP machines, nor to UUCP forwarders. The ARPA nameservers are in essence 555-1212 type services on DDN, redirecting mail and queries about domain names to the proper DDN host. You should only change it if your primary network is not UUCP (e.g. if it is CSNET - you would indicate that the nameservers on RELAY.CS.NET are used) or if you really know what you are doing. > We will use the UUCP nameservers. 3) Type of Organization (commercial, educational, or government): For example: COM > For-Profit Corporation > Non-Profit Corporation > For-Profit Partnership > Proprietorship EDU > Ph.D. granting university > High School GOV > Federal Government Branch > State Government > City Government MIL > Military Branch ORG > Hobby (3rd level using a domain park) 4) The administrative head of the organization. The name, title, mailing address, phone number, and organization of the administrative head of the organization. This is the contact point for administrative and policy questions about the domain. In the case of a research project, this should be the Principal Investigator. The online mailbox and NIC Handle of this person should also be included. We recommend you include both domain and UUCP style addresses for everyone. This person will rarely be contacted, and the primary reason we need this information is to know who to contact if the technical contacts have left, so we recommend that you choose someone you expect to be around and in a position of authority for many years. For example: Administrator > Organization Alpha Beta University > Name John Smith > Title Department Head > Mail Address Dept of Computer Science > 1234 Main St. > Hoople, ND. 90292-6695 > Phone Number 213-555-1511 > Net Mailbox smith@Alpha-Beta.EDU, smith@abu.uucp > NIC Handle 5) Technical contacts. The name, title, mailing address, phone number, and organization of two domain technical contacts. The online mailbox and NIC Handle of the domain technical contact should also be included. This is the contact point for problems with the domain and for updating information about the domain. Also, the domain technical contact may be responsible for hosts in this domain. Both technical contacts will be added to the domain-contacts mailing list, to receive electronic mail about the project and about matters related to domains. Don't list people who hate to get electronic mail. It it not necessary that both people respond quickly to mail, but the primary technical contact should be someone who reads their mail often and can quickly respond should a problem arise. For very small companies, it is permissible to have only one technical contact. For example: > Technical Contact > > Organization Alpha Beta University > Name Jean Smith > Title Researcher > Mail Address Dept of Computer Science > 1234 Main St. > Hoople, ND. 90292-6695 > Phone Number 213-555-1511 > Net Mailbox jean@Alpha-Beta.EDU, jean@abu.uucp > NIC Handle > > Alternate Technical Contact > > Organization Alpha Beta University > Name Fred Rogers > Title Computing Staff > Mail Address Dept of Computer Science > 1234 Main St. > Hoople, ND. 90292-6695 > Phone Number 213-555-1511 > Net Mailbox rogers@Alpha-Beta.EDU, rogers@abu.uucp > NIC Handle 6) The zone technical contact The name, title, mailing address, phone number, and organization of the zone technical contact is needed only if different from the domain technical contact. The zone technical contact is the person responsible for technical problems with the highest level zone of authority in the domain; this zone is the same subtree of the global naming tree as the domain, except that any subzones delegated to other parts of the organization are not part of it. This person is almost always the same as the domain technical contact, so leave this line alone unless very special circumstances apply. 7) Gateway machines. Give the UUCP name and domain name of all machines you intend to make general purpose gateways from UUCP into your domain. These are the machines that will be running RFC 976 compatible software, such as smail, or other appropriate software, through which mail can be sent from the outside. At first, one gateway is probably all you'll need. For example: > abu CS.Alpha-Beta.EDU 8) Technical contact person for each gateway. Give the name (and Title, Postal Address, Electronic Address, Telephone, and NIC Handle, where different from above) of technical contact person for each gateway. > abu, Jean Smith 9) Directory form. This is published monthly for contact and routing information in your d.* file in comp.mail.maps. > #N .abu.edu, abu Give the name of the domain; note the leading dot. In order to make lookup easier, by convention, all lower case is used in the #N line. After the domain name, list the names of your external gateway or gateways, so that a uuhosts lookup using the gateway name will work. > #F Foo.Bar.EDU This is the name of your forwarder. It should be the same as item 2 above. If you do not have a forwarder, you should indicate either (none) You have no forwarder and no preference (Berkeley.EDU) A specific machine you would like to forward for you, but which has not agreed to do so yet. The parentheses indicate that you actually have no forwarder. If you have more than one forwarder, use multiple #F lines. > #O Alpha Beta University This is the name of your organization, in human readable form. > #C Jean Smith, Fred Rogers The names of the technical contacts. > #E jean@Alpha-Beta.EDU, rogers@Alpha-Beta.EDU The electronic mail addresses, in new domain format, of the technical contacts, in the same order as the #C line. It is permissable to use an address such as postmaster@Alpha-Beta.EDU here. If only a postmaster address is used, it should be forwarder to both technical contacts. > #T 213-555-1511, 213-555-4321 The telephone numbers of the domain contacts, in the same order as the #C line. If the same telephone number reaches both contacts, only a single number need be given. > #P Dept of Computer Science, 1234 Main St.; Hoople, ND 90292-6695 The paper mail address for the primary technical contact. Any paper mail generated will use an address consisting of the #C, #O, and #P lines, thus it is unnecessary to duplicate #C or #O information here. If you wish to list a different postal address for the secondary contact (in the rare case where it is different) you can use a #R line. > #L 35 04 05 N / 106 37 46 W city The Latitude/Longitude of the domain. (This can be taken as the location of the gateway machine, or the headquarters, or the contact persons; usually the gateway machine is used.) Give as much precision as you know; if you can only determine the location to the nearest minute, or the nearest few minutes, that's OK. Include "city" only if you are using the location of your city center, for which information is often available in an atlas. For more details, and heuristics for calculation of your coordinates from nearby locations, see the README file posted to comp.mail.maps monthly. If you are unable to determine this information, leave it blank. It is used to draw geographic maps of the network. > #U dgu Machines with which your gateway has a Usenet (netnews) link. This is rarely used, but is included for upward compatibility with the old Usenet map. > #R applied You can include any #R (remarks) lines you wish. The "applied" line should be included verbatim with the application; it indicates the status of your application, and will be changed by us to "inquiry", "submitted", "registered", etc, as appropriate. > #W jean@Alpha-Beta.EDU (Jean Smith); Thu Nov 20 14:51:53 CST 1986 Who last updated the line, and when. The "date" command should be used to generate the date/time, this can easily be done from vi with, for example, cc#W jean@Alpha-Beta.EDU (Jean Smith);ESC :r !date kJ > # This single # line is used to generate white space. Don't include blank lines in the entry, as lookup scripts expect blank lines to separate entries. Additional remarks can be made on lines beginning with # or #R. The previous lines, beginning with #, are all comments to the pathalias program. The information below is interpreted by that program, and its format is more important. Watch out for missing commas and similar syntax errors. > abu .alpha-beta.edu This line indicates that the host with UUCP name "abu" is a gateway into the domain .alpha-beta.edu, literally, "abu can reach .alpha-beta.edu with cost zero." You should include one of these lines for each gateway. By convention, these are given in all lower case. If you have subdomains, you may wish to use similar lines in internal routing distributions: > abumath .math.alpha-beta.edu > abu= abu.alpha-beta.edu This line indicates that the UUCP name "abu" (also sometimes referred to by the psuedo-domain name "abu.UUCP") and the domain name "abu.alpha-beta.edu" are two names for the same host. Literally, "abu.alpha-beta.edu is a nickname for abu" to pathalias. For a small organization with only one machine (or only one machine visible to the outside) no 3rd level name is needed, thus: > stargate= stargate.com If you have more than one machine, but only one gateway, you can choose for the gateway's domain name to be either the 2nd level organizational domain name, or a 3rd level name within the organization, thus, either > stargate= stargate.com or > stargate= stargate.stargate.com could have been used. Be sure this matches the way you've configured smail. > abu ihnp4(DEMAND), ucbvax(DAILY), > dgu(DIRECT), foovax(DEAD) This is the pathalias routing information for the "abu" machine. It lists all the direct UUCP neighbors of abu to which mail can be sent using the host!address notation, thus, abu!ihnp4!user or abu!ihnp4!cbosgd!user works, given the above information (plus other information that ihnp4 can get to cbosgd.) Note the syntax rules: commas after each ")" except that last one, lines beginning with a tab are continuation lines. The words in parentheses describe the "cost" to reach that host from yours, used by the pathalias "least cost path" algorithm. Possible costs, from highest to lowest, include DEAD A link that once worked and may work again, but not now WEEKLY A phone call once a week DAILY A phone call once a day POLLED Same as DAILY; the other host polls you overnight EVENING A phone call on demand, but only during the evening HOURLY A phone call placed at most every hour DEMAND A long distance phone call, placed at any time DIRECT A local phone call, placed at any time DEDICATED Hardwired 9600 baud link or equivalent LOCAL A LAN, such as SMTP/Ethernet, not involving uux A typical UUCP link is either DEMAND or DIRECT. If you use the -r option to uux to delay calling, your UUCP links are no better than HOURLY. There are a few variations on this involving arithmetic and preferences, see the manual page for pathalias for more details. 10) Notices. Please read and understand this section. The UUCP Project will notify you (via mail to "postmaster" in your domain) when your domain is registered. You cannot use your domain name in outgoing mail until registration is completed, although it is OK to install smail (using the host.UUCP domain) ahead of time. We do recommend that you set up to accept incoming mail for your domain name ahead of time, if this is convenient. Several steps are needed before your registration is complete. Some of these steps are approval by the NIC, setting up the nameservers, setting up the forwarder, and publication of your domain in the UUCP map. The UUCP map is not strictly necessary to use your domain, but the other steps are all required. Except for the forwarder, the UUCP Project handles the other steps. Seeing your domain published in the UUCP map is not, by itself, sufficient (or necessary) for the use of your domain name. At any time you can query your status by sending mail to uucp-query@stargate.com. If you send us mail containing an application or a question and don't have an answer within a few days, something is probably wrong, since we normally acknowledge such mail within a day or two.