From: Martin Hamilton <M.T.Hamilton@lut.ac.uk>
Message-Id: <199402281221.MAA18549@lust.mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: URN to URC scenario
To: mitra@pandora.sf.ca.us (Mitra)
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 1994 12:21:05 +0000 (GMT)
In-Reply-To: <CLx1EB.MrA@pandora.sf.ca.us> from "Mitra" at Feb 28, 94 03:51:44 am
Mitra said:
$ The other requirement I've heard recently, is the desire to have
$ self-publishers. this can be handled by having a naming authority that
$ allows any site to register URN's under its FQDN, provided that
$ no other site previously owning that FQDN has done so. This would take
$ a huge registration load off of IANA, especially when URN registration
$ ends up getting written in as part of a popular IIIR server.
Hmm... I think we might benefit from two approaches -
1) URNs registered somewhere under urn[.int] should be unique,
non re-usable, etc etc
2) URNs registered under an existing FQDN (and NOT under urn[.int])
act as stable filenames, and may be re-used
It occurs to me that we might be making this whole naming authority/
publisher business a bit too complicated - is there any support for
merging the naming authority and the publisher info? i.e. instead
of URNs being composed of at least
naming authority + publisher info + resource ID
this would be transmuted into
publisher info + resource ID
$ One open question that I have for the DNS gurus, if we wanted to avoid
$ specifying where in the string is the point to do the lookup, then
$ will DNS allow this to happen - for example if we have a URN
$ of the form urn:net.path.mitra.123456 then is their a way to ask the
$ DNS for mitra.path.net.urn.int and have it return the URN->URC
$ server at path.net.urn.int if their is no server for "mitra.path.net",
$ ideally I'd like to be able to do this without having to put entries
$ into the DNS for each user at path.net (note that path,net would have to
$ guarrantee non-reuse of userid's)
There is provision for this in MX (mail exchanger) records - you
can create wildcards which match everything in a particular domain.
Some bright spark has registered one for the entire .gb domain, so
we get things like this...
:-).gb. 360000 MX 10 sun2.mhs-relay.ac.uk.
:-).gb. 360000 MX 11 sun.mhs-relay.ac.uk.
I don't believe current TXT RR implementations include anything like
this, but would prefer to see the client strip off a domain component,
viz. bloggs.path.net.urn.int -> path.net.urn.int.
I think this brings up the thorny question of where we distinguish
between information which is used to locate the URN->??? server and
what is info local to it!
Martin