Slashdot Mirror
.museum TLDs are Live
GuNgA-DiN writes: "Several sites in .museum have now gone live: you can check out met.art.museum, stockholm.music.museum, and minnesota.science.museum, for instance. You can navigate the hierarchical structure of this TLD via index.museum, or go directly to an index page for a particular second level domain by going to that domain, e.g., art.museum.
Since the .museum TLD is still in its experimental phase, these domains haven't been delegated to their registrants yet, but resolve as CNAME records in the TLD root, pointing at the other domains each site already has. Thus, .museum addresses can currently only be used as additional addresses for sites that already have some other domain. MX records haven't yet been set up, so email to these domains won't yet work."
In Britain some museums (eg the Natural History Museum) are counted as academic institutions so they appear in .ac.uk along with the universities. Strangely, the next-door Science Museum seems not to appreciate this and is redirecting from its old nmsi.ac.uk domain to something much less classy.
Darn, that Slashdot goatse indicator is spoiling the surprise of clicking on the links to find out what the domains actually are :-(.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Ignoring how stupid those new TLDs .museum
.aero really are... technically the MX is
and
already there:
obelix:chris$ host -t mx met.art.museum
met.art.museum is a nickname for www.metmuseum.org
www.metmuseum.org is a nickname for metmuseum.org
metmuseum.org mail is handled (pri=10) by proxy00.metmuseum.org
But of course no one told the mailserver...
220 mail00.metmuseum.org InterScan VirusWall NT ESMTP 3.5 (build 1294) ready at Sat, 01 Dec 2001 08:20:17 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
MAIL FROM:
250 : Sender Ok
RCPT TO:
550 Relaying denied to met.art.museum
You don't follow a CNAME to a CNAME and then follow the MX. That's not how it works.
Of course, technically, you're not supposed to have a CNAME to a CNAME in the first place.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
No no. Domain names are not supposed to point to ANYTHING. *Host* names are supposed to point to machines, and technically, a given name can't be both a domain name and a hostname. This is why we've got www.[whatever].[tld] everywhere. But somewhere in the mid-90s the web grew to be the Most Important Thing On the Internet, and it became normal practice to basically make one's domain name also a hostname pointed to one's web server.
Since when? Do you have an RFC cite for this? DNS is quite unopinionated on the subject - host names and domain names are treated the same.
I remember back in '93 hmc.edu used this technique, but not for a web site. It had an MX record, but some broken mail clients of the day did not consult MX records, so it also had an A record for the appropriate IP address.
I believe this was a widespread technique to work around these broken mail clients long before the web became popular, although I don't have any evidence to back this up.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
The real tragedy is that we have been unable to shake off ICANN.
People who actually acare about the problem (and everyone who uses systems set up by such people) have shaken off ICANN. Point yourself at one of the other roots. Just do it. ICANN's existence is 100% defacto. Again: just do it.