Re: Were A record domain names ever limited to 23 characters?

[bmanning () vacation karoshi com]

 back in the day,

 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.ca.us.

 existed to test the length of DNS label.  circa 1992

 ^b.com also existed (yes, we considered ^p)


 the heady days of DNS evolution!

/bill


On Fri, Oct 07, 2011 at 06:16:46PM -0700, Owen DeLong wrote:
> NSI was never the only registrar. They were just the only registrar
> for COM, ORG, NET, EDU, and possibly a few other TLDs, but,
> they were, for example, never the registrar for US or many other
> CCTLDs.
>
> Therefore, it was not internet wide, though I will admit that it did
> cover most of the widely known gTLDs.
>
> Owen
>
> On Oct 7, 2011, at 4:45 PM, steve pirk [egrep] wrote:
>
> > It turns out it was an artificial limitation on Network Solution's part.
> > Being the only registrar at the time, it was pretty much internet wide at
> > that point, contrary to the RFC spec.
> >
> > What was so funny was that someone got Internic/Network Solutions to up the
> > limit. Apparently just to save some money on reprinting movie posters... ok,
> > so they would have had to change some trailers...
> > ;-]
> >
> > On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 16:39, Jimmy Hess <mysidia () gmail com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Joe Hamelin <joe () nethead com> wrote:
> > > > I remember tales from when there was an eight character limit.  But that
> > > was
> > > > back when you didn't have to pay for them and they assigned you a class-c
> > > > block automatically.  Of course it took six weeks to register because
> > > there
> > > > was only one person running the registry.
> > >
> > > You may be referring to a limitation of a certain OS regarding a
> > > hostname; or some network's policy.
> > > But the DNS protocol itself never had a limit of 8 characters.
> > > When we are talking about the contents of "A" record names,
> > >
> > > I would refer you to
> > > http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2181.txt
> > > "RFC 2181
> > > Clarifications to the DNS Specification R. Elz, R. Bush
> > > [ July 1997 ] (TXT = 36989) (Updates RFC1034, RFC1035, RFC1123)
> > > (Updated-By RFC4035, RFC2535, RFC4343, RFC4033, RFC4034, RFC5452)
> > > (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) (Stream: IETF, Area: int, WG: dnsind) "
> > >
> > > "
> > > Elz & Bush                  Standards Track                    [Page 12]
> > > ...
> > > Occasionally it is assumed that the Domain Name System serves only
> > >  the purpose of mapping Internet host names to data, and mapping
> > >  Internet addresses to host names.  This is not correct, the DNS is a
> > >  general (if somewhat limited) hierarchical database, and can store
> > >  almost any kind of data, for almost any purpose.
> > > ...
> > > 11. Name syntax
> > > "
> > > The length of any one label is limited to between 1 and 63 octets.  A
> > > full domain
> > >  name is limited to 255 octets (including the separators).  The zero
> > >  length full name is defined as representing the root of the DNS tree,
> > >  and is typically written and displayed as ".".  Those restrictions
> > >  aside, any binary string whatever can be used as the label of any
> > >  resource record.
> > > "
> > >
> > > --
> > > -JH
> >
> >
> >
> > -- 
> > steve pirk
> > refiamerica.org
> > "father... the sleeper has awakened..." paul atreides - dune
> > kexp.org member august '09