Underscore Character

[Kevin Darcy]

Don Buchholz wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Nov 1999, Kevin Darcy wrote:
> >
> > Whatever happened to "be liberal in what you accept" anyway? Is RFC 1123's
> > Robustness Principle dead and buried?
> >
>
> >From RFC-1123, Section 1.2.2  Robustness Principle
>
>                 "Be liberal in what you accept, and
>                  conservative in what you send"
>
> IMHO, BIND is inherently a "sender", and in a properly running Internet,
> nameservers should *not* be advertising illicit hostnames!

And if someone said tomorrow that the letter "f" was "illicit"? Would the
presence of "f"s in hostnames suddenly make the Internet malfunction? I'm all
for standards enforcement when the standards have reasonable technical
justification. But if the only justification is the circular "to ensure
interoperability with servers that enforce the standard", then I feel compelled
to point out that the emperor wears no clothes.

> I ran across the underscore problem a few years ago, when I read the
> *warnings* from BIND 4.9.x (or was is 4.8.x ...).  I read the relevant
> RFC's and said "oops, our mistake!" and fixed it!

Whereas my reaction was "oh great! now my only cost-effective option is to turn
off name-checking"...


- Kevin