Host names are disappearing

[hedrick at topaz.UUCP]

NIC has been directed by DCA to remove all non-domain nicknames from
the host table.  In order to explain this, I have to give you some
context.

The plan is that eventually the host table will go away completely.
It turns out that there are just too many hosts for anybody to keep
track anymore.  So the host table is being replaced by a set of name
servers.  As you may have noticed, official Internet names now have
all these dots, e.g. borax.lcs.mit.edu.  The new format of host name
is designed to be evaluated by talking to a system of name servers,
rather than using a host table.  The idea is that when you see
borax.lcs.mit.edu, you first contact a "root" server and ask it who
EDU is.  The root server returns the address of the server for EDU.
You then ask EDU who MIT is.  That gives you the address of the MIT
server.  You then ask it who LCS is, etc.  (There are duplicate
servers at each level.)  Once this system is working properly, in
theory NIC will no longer maintain a host table at all.  The
subroutines that used to look up names in /etc/hosts (gethostbyname
and gethostbyaddr) are simply replaced by subroutines that query the
system of name servers.  In the interim, the NIC host table is just a
subset.  We only register hosts with them that we think will be doing
a lot of business with the outside.  If everybody registered all their
hosts, the host table would be impractically large.  (Indeed for many
machines, it is already too large to be practical.)

Now, to your question.  Until recently, NIC's host table included
non-domain nicknames.  E.g. red.rutgers.edu, which you ask about, used
to be called ru-red.  In the days before all those dots, people tended
to choose names with their institutions built in, e.g.  ru-red, cmua,
su-score, mit-ai.  When domains started, we changed the primary names
to follow the new conventions, e.g. red.rutgers.edu, a.cs.cmu.edu,
score.stanford.edu, ai.ai.mit.edu.  (Obviously it would be redundant
to have ru-red.rutgers.edu.)  But we left the old names around to help
transition.  The edict has now gone out that all of the old names are
to be purged.  Thus the host table will be getting shorter, and you
will have to start using the full form of the name.

I have various reservations about the new scheme, but at least you
now know what is happening.