[Linux-aus] It's that time of year again

[Glen Turner]

On 02/07/09 16:23, Sarah Stokely wrote:
> I'm mildly curious as to why anyone ever thought it would be useful to
> provision semi-permanent domains in the first place.

It's the 1990s, an era with no PKI certificates and no VPNs. And no spam.

Mail servers accept SMTP from anyone. They do a reverse DNS check, but
are otherwise insanely trusting by today's standards.

So you are at a conference. That conference has a terminal room. Those
terminals need DNS names so that mail can be sent from them.

Adding those names to example.edu.au is a pain --- that is usually managed
by The Perl Script from Hell, with access to that controlled by The
Bastard Operator from Hell.

What you need is a temporary domain on some temporary DNS servers. A domain
such as example.conf.au.



Linux.conf.au can be seen as a misuse of that domain's policy. And is why
we have so much trouble.

BUT, we have been assured by AuDA for the best part of five years that
the domain is about to come under the AuDA umbrella, about to have rules
similar to all other domains, with linux.conf.au grandfathered in.

So we've been lead along. It's probably time to apply some heat to AuDA
to say that the time has come.  We don't even want AuDA to experience the
costs of a conf.au auction. Our minimum ask is for a policy which acknowledges
a permanent allocation of linux.conf.au to Linux Australia.

-- 
  Glen Turner   <http://www.gdt.id.au/~gdt/>