Just what *is* a hostname (rfc952/1123, etc)

[David Carmean]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 09:24:20PM +0000, Barry Margolin wrote:

[snip]

> Perhaps a better way to answer this is that non-fully-qualified name are
> just an abbreviation mechanism that can be used in certain contexts
> (e.g. in zone files they're just a shorthand for the name with the $ORIGIN
> appended, and when invoking a resolver it will try appending the suffixes
> in the search list).  As far as on-the-wire protocols are concerned, names
> are always fully qualified.

Which appears to have the interesting side-effect of making it impossible
to add relative names to a zone via DDNS, either as owner names or in
the RDATA.  But RAM and disk are cheap these days, and it might cut down
on mistakes (?).

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