2008-05-13 - News - Chris Thompson
The restructuring of the database to allow free use of sub-domains, mooted in a previous article, has now been implemented.
As before, all names in the database have an associated domain whose
value must be in a predefined table and is used to control user access.
However this can now be any suffix part of the name following a dot
(or it can be the whole name). If a CO has access to the domain
dept.cam.ac.uk, then they can register names such as
foobar.dept.cam.ac.uk (as previously) or foo.bar.dept.cam.ac.uk,
or even dept.cam.ac.uk alone (although this last may be inadvisable).
Such names can be used for "boxes" as registered and rescinded via the
single_ops page, and also (to the rather limited extent that COs
have delegated control over them) for vboxes and anames.
There are cases when one already registered domain name is a
suffix of another, e.g. sub.dept.cam.ac.uk and dept.cam.ac.uk.
Often these are in the same management zone and the longer name
is present only to satisfy the previously enforced constraints.
In these cases we shall phase out the now unnecessary domain.
However, in a few cases they are in different management zones,
with different sets of COs having access to them. It is possible
for a CO with access only to dept.cam.ac.uk to register a name
such as foobar.sub.dept.cam.ac.uk, but its domain part will
be taken as dept.cam.ac.uk and not sub.dept.cam.ac.uk. This
is likely to cause confusion, and we will be relying on the good
sense of COs to avoid such situations.
For CNAMEs, the mechanism using strip_components described in the
previous article still exists at the
moment, but it will be soon be replaced by a cname_ops web page in
which the domain part is deduced automatically, as for the other
database object types mentioned above, rather than having to be
specified explicitly. (Now implemented, 2008-06-05.)
We advise that COs should not use sub-domains too profligately, and plan their naming schemes carefully. Any questions about the new facilities should be emailed to us.