SIP in higher education

[Art Gaylord <>]

Hi,

I generally like Ben's Domain Redirect idea, but am concerned about 
dealing with prefix collisions and the complexities of parsing variable 
length prefixes coupled with variable length local extensions. It also 
seems unlikely that campuses with long names will really want to use 
that as a prefix.

An alternative that I just thought of might be to use the Autonomous 
System number associated with each campus.  This has the advantage of 
being globally unique, relatively short, and decimal based to start 
with.  The obvious disadvantage is that AS numbers something that many 
people know. On the other hand people don't inherently a campuses area 
code and exchange prefix either.  Some campuses may have multiple AS 
numbers but this isn't really a problem as they could either pick one as 
their SIP.edu prefix or use multiple the prefer.  Since there won't be 
collisions either way it isn't an architectural problem.

Just an idea and one I've not carefully thought about, but figured it 
might worth others considering as well.

Art

--
Arthur S. Gaylord
Director, Computer and Information Services
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole MA 02543


508-289-3329