Eliot Lear wrote:
Paul Vixie wrote:
utk-mail11 may have seemed to you like a way to extend the internet, but
to the greybeards of the time who had crapped upon bitnet and uucp,
decnet
mail11 (for example, DECWRL.ENET.DEC.COM) was an abuse of the MX RR,
not a
"good way" to use the technology.
Here our views of history differ. I can't say that I had a gray beard
at the time, nor that I was at all involved in the design, but I was
there, and I think there was something of a view that the whole point
of MXes was for the MX relay to bridge between online and offline
devices. It was well understood at the time that MANY more systems
were in fact on the networks that you mentioned than were on the
ARPANET. And I would even argue that there MXes solved a major
problem, which was that there was that sites that sat on both UUCP and
the Internet often times Got It Wrong with regard to the precedence
of "!". The abstraction that MX provided made relaying behavior much
more explicit. I think this was understood at the time.
I think the argument was really that putting another network's name
space within a DNS zone did not make good sense, particularly when that
network crossed administrative boundaries. Of course (just like today)
the argument was not always expressed with sufficient clarity, so
sometimes what came out was "what you are doing is Bad!"
This was also back in the day when people seriously argued that DNS
should only be used for host names. They didn't understand that the
concept of "host" was going to get fuzzier and less relevant over time.
Keith
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