RFC-289
by Darius Kazemi, October 16 2019
In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.
Hope
RFC-289 is titled “What We Hope Is An Official List of Host Names”. It's authored by Richard Watson of the SRI-ARC Network Information Center and dated December 21, 1971.
The technical content
This RFC is “what we hope will be accepted
” as the host names and nicknames for each host. Watson provides a brief history of how we got here, beginning with RFC-226. The current system of a short “formal name” and a long “nickname” is painted as a “reasonable compromise
” that was reached at a Network Working Group meeting.
The list published here reflects input from “almost all sites
”.
Analysis
Watson closes with this note:
I think people should feel free to change their host name when ever the situation warrants.
I smell trouble, though I could be wrong.
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About me
I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.