Message for Bind-users

[Kevin Darcy]

McNair, Dan wrote:

> Correct me if I am wrong, but the underscore is not a legal character in any domain name.  This is not a limitation of BIND, it is a restriction imposed by the domain name standard.  My guess is that there are both practical and historical reasons for the restriction.

There is no "practical" reason other than "this is the standard we agreed to way back when and we're afraid to change it because then we might break some lazy programmers' code (possibly causing security holes, cancer, famine, or maybe even global thermonuclear
devastation)".

As for the historical reason, I've heard second- or third-hand that some old teletypes used underscores instead of backspaces, or something primitive like that. So they (understandably) had trouble with underscores in names, or for that matter, anything else. This was
probably 70's or maybe even 60's technology.

This restriction kinda reminds me of how the dimensions of some of the space shuttle parts are supposedly influenced by the width of a Roman warhorse's rear end (war horses -> roads -> wagons -> railroad tracks, you get the idea). Everyone is always too cowardly to risk
breaking compatibility with the old junk, so we have to live with these arbitrary restrictions forever...

                                                                                                                                                    - Kevin