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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Underscores in host names
Paul Vixie wrote: > (why are we talking about this on NANOG rather than NAMEDROPPERS?) because it's not relevant to the underlying rules >>Check-names was a bad idea that might have been justified at the time, >>but pretending it remains justified by 952/1123 has got to stop sometime. > at the time of check-names, i outlawed _ as a side effect of punting. in > order to strip/prevent newline characters in PTR targets, i had to be able > to refer to an RFC (lest people come to me with many individual sob stories > about this or that special character that either should or should not be > stripped/prevented in gethostbyaddr().) the only RFC i found that had any > remote chance of getting me off this hook was #952. ergo, _ had to die in > order that my inbox might live. > > but it was wrong, and the need for it is past, and it's time for redress. So, you found some pre-existing rules, used them as cover for your problem, and now that your ~problem is fixed the pre-existing rules shouldn't matter to anybody anymore? Come on now, isn't it slightly possible that those rules were pre-existing for reasons that have nothing to do with you? Consider the code-point value of "$" as it is used in iso-646-us versus iso-646-de or any of the other ECMA derivatives, or any of the other ISO-* derivatives that don't have direct ASCII character mappings. That character (and many others) can have different and distinct code-point values in multiple character sets, but it has to be identical everywhere in order for it to have meaning. Thus, allowing the "character" to be used means mandating a specific code-point value for that character. Alternatively (and what we have in the pre-existing rules) is to forbid those characters entirely, so that nobody is forced to kautau to a specific nationalized character set. While that may feasible in protocol commands and such, it's not feasible to mandate that /etc/hosts MUST always use US-ASCII code-point values for characters that may not even exist in the local nationalized charset. Really, spend some time with the ECMA derivative sets and you'll see what I mean--there are characters in some of them that aren't in the others, or they are misplaced, or they are defined as alternates, and so forth. I'm glad you fixed your problem, but really, this isn't about DNS, it is about universal representation of hostnames despite the media that is used to convey those names. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
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