FQDN

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "John" == John Hascall <john at iastate.edu> writes:

    John> Experimentally, stupidly long names seem to work in at least
    John> some cases:

    John> Why somebody would want to actually use such a thing
    John> escapges me though, as the whole point of DNS is that names
    John> are easier than numbers.

Er, no. The whole point of DNS is to give a distributed, scalable,
consistent name space with local content control that can easily be
looked up. Whether those names are "easier than numbers" or not is
immaterial. The name that's needed for a reverse lookup contains many
labels: 6 in the case of an IPv4 address for example. But humans
rarely lookup these names directly or ever type them out as input to a
tool like dig. Software does it for them. When an E.164 telephone
number is mapped into a domain name for ENUM, that name could have up
to 17 labels. Again, this will generally be done by software.