I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-ids-dnsnames-01.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-01.txt
       Pages     : 10
       Date      : 08/07/1996

It has become a common practice to use symbolic names (usually CNAMEs) 
in the Domain Name Service (DNS - [1,2]) to refer to network services 
such as anonymous FTP [3] servers, Gopher [4] servers, and most 
notably World-Wide Web HTTP [5] 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 (DNS SRV) work.      

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