At 10:56 06.11.98 -0500, Jack De Winter wrote:
3) DJB feels that having a [static] A record for a site that is only ever
intermittantly connected is a waste. [For the record, I think this is a
bit silly too. Using DHCP from a dynamic pool would be better if a
proper solution such as ETRN or ATRN is provided.]
I've run with this solution for an interminenttly-connected PC for
a few years (static IP on office LAN, laptop that went with me on trips).
Sometimes its name escaped into the Great Wild Yonder, so people would
send mail to it, so I had an MX (the lowest-valued one, in fact) pointing
to my "spool" mailhost. (You can still find it in Four11, I think).
If I had trusted my mail+news+other mailers not to reveal the hostname,
I might not have bothered with the MX, and thus have been one of the
Bad Boys with a working mail system on an interminenttly-connected host.
But the A record was, I think, better present than absent; it was
always telling the truth about the connection between the name and the
IP address, just not saying anything about whether it was there or not.
Harald A
--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Maxware, Norway
Harald(_dot_)Alvestrand(_at_)maxware(_dot_)no