nanog mailing list archives

Re: looking for terminology recommendations concerning non-rooted FQDNs


From: Doug Barton <dougb () dougbarton us>
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:10:55 -0800

On 02/25/2013 09:49 AM, Brian Reichert wrote:
On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 12:18:00PM -0500, Jay Ashworth wrote:
If I understood Brian correctly, his problem is that people/programs
are trying to retrieve things from, eg:

https://my.host.name./this/is/a/path

and the SSL library fails the certificate match if the cert doesn't contain
the absolute domain name as an altName -- because *the browser* (or whatever)
does not normalize before calling the library.

I'd argue that if you have an absolute domain name, then that _is_
the 'normalized' form of the domain name; it's an unambigious
representation of the domain name. (Here, I'm treating the string
as a serialized data structure.)

Choosing to remove the notion of "this is rooted", and then asking
any (all?) other layers to handle the introduced ambiguity sounds
like setting yourself up for the issues that RFC 1535 was drawing
attention to.

Brian,

This may be a silly question, but what's your goal here? Your OP was about terminology, but the thread has gone down several different off-topic ratholes.

Doug



Current thread: