Subj : The Open Root Server Confederation To : Tobias Ernst From : Jonathan de Boyne Pollard Date : Sun Mar 18 2001 03:21 pm TE> People usually don't type those dots at the end because the additional TE> lookup does not cost much overhead and top level domain names are TE> pretty unique. E.g. if you type "www.ibm.com" you don't run into the TE> risk of finding a host like "www.ibm.com.yourdomain", because nobody TE> names hosts "com", "org", "net", "xx" (where xx is a two-letter TE> country abbrevation"). TE> Now, if people create additional root name servers (and the one TE> mentioned here is by far not the only such project), soon there will TE> be thousands of new top level domains. [...] Already there are hundreds. TE> Consequently, those will no longer be unique, and there will exist, for TE> example, a TLD "news" as well as hosts named "news" (like "news.com") etc. TE> Then, you will often not get what you want when you don't finish your host name TE> entry with a dot, so it is good practice to accustom oneselft to always typing TE> a dot behind a host name to designate it as a fully qualified name. This is a very good point, one that I meant to mention myself but forgot to. I think that it's a good idea for people to get into the habit of using a fully-qualified domain name right now. I've tried to get into the habit myself. (Unfortunately, there is sometimes a problem with virtual web hosts and the use of fully-qualified domain names. I consider this to be a configuration error on the part of the server administrator, personally.) This is because there *already is* a top-level domain named "news.", and without the explicit dot this confusion happens *right now*: [C:\]grep /bu domain %ETC%\resolv2 domain com [C:\]host www.news home.cnet.com = 216.200.247.132 [C:\]host www.news. www.news = 204.80.125.133 [C:\] ( "www.news.com." is an alias of "home.cnet.com.". ) ¯ JdeBP ® --- FleetStreet 1.22 NR * Origin: JdeBP's point, using Squish (1:109/921.70) .