[ih] Which two letters? [Internet should be in private hands]

[christian de larrinaga]

Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> writes:

> My favourite case was not the notorious cs.ucl.ac.uk, whose mail often ended
> up in Czechoslovakia,

Did the then czech security people set up a mail server at uk.ac.ucl.cs
to receive this bounty?

; C



> but uk.oracle.com, Oracle's London office, who supported
> CERN when we first became an Oracle customer. JANET, naturally, couldn't
> forward to com.oracle.uk, but our gateway thought they could.
>
> We got the heuristics in our mail gateway right in the end, but it took a while.
>
> It was around that time that Jon Postel politely explained that we couldn't
> have .cern., and recommended .cern.int., which we declined because politics.
>
> Regards
>    Brian Carpenter
>
> On 09-Dec-22 05:06, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond via Internet-history wrote:
>> Hello all,
>> please see my comments interspersed in the text below:
>> On 08/12/2022 15:24, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote:
>>> On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 12:59 AM George Ross via Internet-history <
>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> The naming scheme which JANET-attached Universties used did start with
>>>> "uk"
>>>> rather than "gb" -- we were uk.ac.ed.cs.  That was in place before we
>>>> joined the IP internet and started using the DNS too, and I suspect the
>>>> prospect of sites having two different names or else having to change the
>>>> JANET scheme, which was much more heavily used than the DNS at the time,
>>>> didn't appeal, in addition to the political sensitivities.
>>>>
>>>> We renamed ourselves as dcs.ed.ac.uk shortly after, to avoid confusion in
>>>> the mail gateways, as .CS was a ccTLD.
>> Yes, a lot of computer departments did so, but the most challenging
>> was
>> the other way around, with one of the most influential sites at the time
>> cs.net - and I remember that I had the most trouble getting emails to it
>> because sometimes it would look-up under .net zone and sometimes under
>> .cs zone, so sometimes I used to have to cheat by emailing through a
>> third party open relay, like cunyvm.cuny.edu or uunet.net or
>> decwrl.dec.com or uucp.sun.com who, for other reasons, all used to be
>> pretty good at routing emails cleverly on the Internet.
>> 
>>>>
>>> Quick gloss on George's note for those who weren't there.  The UK, due to
>>> JANET or simply a magnetic attraction to doing things the opposite way from
>>> most folks, initially had domain names with the TLD first.
>>>
>>> This meant a bunch of Internet email systems had a "both-ways" switch that
>>> involved parsing domain names left to right and right to left to see if
>>> either version made sense.
>> Only the "gateways" like uk.ac.ucl.cs.nss that then became
>> uk.ac.nfsnet-relay, uk.ac.mhs-relay, uk.ac.rl.ib (the RAL gateway to
>> Bitnet) and uk.ac.ukc (for UUCP). Trying to do this within the JANET NRS
>> scheme (yes that's what's it's called, designed in 1983 - more info on
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS ) was challenging. I know
>> because I tried playing with mailer systems in Coloured Book Software
>> and it was impossible, downright impossible to think of every instance
>> for it to work well - more info on Colour Book at:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols )
>> This is of course not to confuse with the ITU (then CCITT) coloured
>> books that determined successive 4 yearly editions of CCITT standards
>> like X3, X21, X25, X400 which the UK Coloured Books also used.
>> I have no idea why UK was used instead of GB, but the order in which
>> it
>> was used probably stems from the X.400 address notation that started
>> with Country first, Admin Name, Carrier Name, Organisation Name,
>> Recipient Name etc. which in itself, for anyone who has ever used it,
>> was nothing short of a nightmare.
>> 
>>>
>>> Eventually, as the DNS grew, some domain names made sense in both
>>> directions (stories that some in the DNS leadership team encouraged this
>>> mayhem to persuade our friends in the UK to rethink their ordering reflect
>>> joking comments at the time, but I don't think anyone did it intentionally)
>>> and this led to changes such as those George describes.
>>>
>> Plus an increasing number of us used the Internet through the NSFNET
>> gateway at UCL and got our way finally to convince the powers that be
>> that TCP-IP was the future and could be tunnelled over X.25... and then
>> of course that was upgraded to native TCP-IP on E1 leased lines soon after.
>> Kindest regards,
>> Olivier


-- 
christian de larrinaga 
https://firsthand.net