pro/cons of virtual hosting services

> There certainly are cases where this practise can be justified even when
> the address space conservation is taken into account.  Strongly
> discouraging does not mean forbidding. 
> 
> If this indeed consumes relatively little address space and parts of
> subnets which are currently unused it is problem.  However promoting
> this practise will of course create additional demand.  Some
> contributions to the discussion already said "we have to do it because
> *they* do it". 
> 
> http://company.com/ generally is generally no more intuitive than
> http://company.com/company/.  This is a rehash of the "predictable
> domain name" and "predictable mailbox name" discussion.

But surely you need to admit that it is very messy.  Who likes a messy 
implementaion?

> It only makes a
> difference for very well known company names.  Promoting this practise
> will give a wrong image of prestige to a "short URL". 

 
> Promoting this practise will also put additional pressure on DNS
> namespace by suggesting registrations of all sorts of entities as close
> as possible to the root of the tree.  This creates even more pressures
> on an already very loaded system that can only work and scale well if
> organised hierarchically. 


The IP addresses that are being used for 'web aliasing' should not be 
worried about - they are only a tempory measure until th web client 
communicate the full url to the web server.  Basically, as soon as 
Netscape implements this all web browsers within a matter of mounths 
wiill follow suit - look at HTML.  Aftre this transition all IP addresses 
used for web aliiasing may be reused for 'real machines'.

When reading the documnetion of CIDR it states that current IP addresses
will run out in approx 3 years.  The trasition to full URL will occur in a
FAR shorter time. 

You are right in saying though, that current practices cause harm to the 
DNS - however your suggestion of http://company.com/company/ is an equal 
offender in this respect.  Any strain put on the DNS will be permanent and 
cannot be reclaimed like the IP addresses can.

The only way to help this situation is to remove the rediculously 
limiting heirarchy that is enforced on it.  The DNS is just far to 
flat.  Also, (although it will really irritate many of my customers) 
stopping resitration to the .com domain would help things out an awful lot.

> Further process: 
> 
> If this group does not consider this policy adaequate, please define another.

Worry more about the mess that the DNS is becoming rather then the IP 
addresses used for this purpose.

Aid

--
Adrian J Bool			| http://www.u-net.com/
Network Operations		| tel://44.1925.633144/
U-NET Ltd			| fax://44.1925.633847/