sub domain for ddns - resolving

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:27 PM -0400 2005-05-10, Kevin Darcy wrote:

>  If you have anything bigger than just a "toy" network, I'd also give
>  serious consideration to using fully-qualified domain names exclusively
>  instead of shortnames. Once you get beyond a certain number of
>  subdomains, shortnames become problematic, but, unfortunately, it may be
>  too late by then, because using shortnames is one of those bad habits
>  that tends to be hard to get users to break.

	Indeed.  Consider the name of "gw".  Is that a short name or an 
FQDN?  Since the ".gw" ccTLD for Guinea-Bissau has MX records, it can 
be considered to be both.


	You can imagine how much trouble this caused for a wall street 
trading firm that had their external mail server named 
"gw.theirdomain.example.com", which they always referred to 
internally as just "gw" when some systems apparently decided to 
consider this an FQDN as opposed to an unqualified hostname.

	Fortunately for the wall street trading firm, the people who 
operate the ".gw" ccTLD were bouncing mail to unknown parties as 
opposed to silently sucking it all up and trying to see what they 
could find out, otherwise we never would have discovered what was 
causing a significant percentage of our outgoing mail to mysteriously 
disappear.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.