I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-ids-dnsnames-02.txt

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 A Revised Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts 
 directories. This draft is a work item of the Integrated Directory 
 Services Working Group of the IETF.                                       

       Title     : Use of DNS Aliases for Network Services                 
       Author(s) : M. Hamilton, R. Wright
       Filename  : draft-ietf-ids-dnsnames-02.txt
       Pages     : 9
       Date      : 01/31/1997

It has become a common practice to use symbolic names (usually CNAMEs) in 
the Domain Name Service (DNS - [RFC-1034, RFC-1035]) to refer to network 
services such as anonymous FTP [RFC-959] servers, Gopher [RFC-1436] 
servers, and most notably World-Wide Web HTTP [RFC-1945] servers.  This is 
desirable for a number of reasons.  It provides a way of moving services 
from one machine to another transparently, and a mechanism by which people 
or agents may programatically discover that an organization runs, say, 
a World-Wide Web server.   

Although this approach has been almost universally adopted, there is 
no standards document or similar specification for these commonly 
used names.  This document seeks to rectify this situation by 
gathering together the extant "folklore" on naming conventions, and 
proposes a mechanism for accommodating new protocols.   

It is important to note that these naming conventions do not provide 
a complete long term solution to the problem of finding a 
particular network service for a site.  There are efforts in 
other IETF working groups to address the long term solution 
to this problem, such as the Server Location Resource 
Records (DNSSRV) [RFC-2052] work.                                                      

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