Jim,
You wrote (answering Mark's message):
>
> Insofar as you are commenting upon this, you seem to have missed my
> narrow technical point. Roberto Gaetano asserted that an IP address
> uniquely identifies a domain name. This is not true.
Speaking about missing the points, I come back to this issue because you
raised it again. The point I was making in my original note was completely
incorrelated with whether an IP address uniquely identifies a domain name or
not.
You picked the sentence:
> I find the analogy with the phone system (as you present it) not fully
> applicable, as the phone number is a "key" in the system, and
> therefore
> unique due to the way that the system is built, while the
> domain name is an
> "attribute" of the unique key (the IP address), and therefore could be
> duplicated.
and made a whole story about the "unique key", interpreting this as if I
said that the relationship domain name - IP address is unique (which I did
not say).
The example was aimed at showing that while the telephone numbers are
unique, domain names are not if we allow multiple independent roots.
Therefore, while if you pick up the phone and call a number you will get
*always* to the same person, in the proposed system you type a domain name
and you will get to a different domain *depending on how your system is
configured*.
And this result is independent from uniqueness or not of the relationship
domain name - IP address.
I am honored that you broke your long silence to reply to a message of yours
truly, but I would have appreciated an opinion about this problem of
substance, i.e. on how to guarantee certitude to reach the business you want
to address on the Net via its domain name under a multiple root system
(independently from the configuration of your computer and/or the choices of
your ISP).
> Sometimes a name
> corresponds to many IP addresses (as in round-robin DNS) and sometimes
> an IP address corresponds to many names (some Web servers permit many
> names to be associated with one IP address). The domain name system
> is not really like the telephone system.
>
So what?
Regards
Roberto
P.S.: Of course it is not. If they were identical we wouldn't need both ;>)
