.oz .au - please explain.
Cameron Newham
Why do a lot of Australian email addresses have ".oz.au" ?
I can see ".au" is for australia but what sub-domain does ".oz" refer to?
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| Cameron (The Master) | "I find it hard to take seriously the opinion of |
| c...@syzygy.DIALix.oz.au | someone who puts a Star Trek: TNG quote in their |
| c...@adied.oz.au | .sig" -- Richard J. Rauser |
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Samuel Wai Kay LEUNG
>Why do a lot of Australian email addresses have ".oz.au" ?
>I can see ".au" is for australia but what sub-domain does ".oz" refer to?
I don't know am I correct, I think "oz" is for Australia, and "au" is for
Australian area (I am not sure what is that called) including some countries
like New Zealand, etc.
Samuel
Kevin Moore
>Why do a lot of Australian email addresses have ".oz.au" ?
>I can see ".au" is for australia but what sub-domain does ".oz" refer to?
In the ACSnet days, the good old days when email was actually slower than
surface mail, Australia's domain name was .oz, a name redolent with anti-
establishment values. A domain name with a sense of humour. When AARGHnet
came on line, funded by the Vice-Chancellor's comittee as an educational
network, they didn't approve of it, and the po-faced .au was substituted,
and was really boring.
However, a lot of the old ACSnet sites based in Sydney kept the old .oz
name as a sub-domain name. Aunty Victoria didn't. There is, however, hope
for the developement of a Victorian sense of humour. They have just voted
for Jeff Kennett, and are going to need one real soon now.
******************************************************************************
The reason is that the program was written in * Kevin Moore
BASIC, a sort of computer baby-talk. * k...@buc.edu.au
Richard Dawkins *
******************************************************************************
Mark Garrett Internet: mark@arvak.une.edu.au Phone: +61 66 20 3859
Bzzzt... Wrong :)
.oz dates back from the days when Academia was connected only by
a network system called ACSnet. All sites that connected to ACSnet exist
in the .oz domain.
Since the new kid on the block (now old enough to stop buying acne cream:) AARnet came along it needed a domain for Australia within internet thus .au
So the ACSnet domain existed in parallel to AARnet's .au As they could not
be the same, we are left with a whole lot of old ACSnet domain hosts, some of
which are real AARnet hosts, others exist only as ACSnet.
Cheers
Mark :)
--
Mark Garrett Internet: ma...@arvak.une.edu.au Phone: +61 66 20 3859
University of New England, Northern Rivers, Lismore NSW Australia.
Craig Dewick
>>I can see ".au" is for australia but what sub-domain does ".oz" refer to?
>
>I don't know am I correct, I think "oz" is for Australia, and "au" is for
>Australian area (I am not sure what is that called) including some countries
>like New Zealand, etc.
My understanding is that '.oz' originated when ACSnet was the local
equivalent of the Internet, and that '.au' was adopted by AARnet when
it was created as '.au' is the ISO standard country code for Australia
(ISO specifies a two-letter code for all countries connected via the
Internet, althouhg the US doesn't use '.us' as that's where the Internet
was born).
As a consequent, machines caught in the ACSnet karma have to use '.oz.au'
on the end of their domain name for messages travelling to the Internet
via AARnet.
--
Craig Dewick | - Railway Preservation Industries P/L -
Send email to: | actively supporting the preservation of
cr...@kralizec.zeta.org.au | Australia's railway heritage.
Mark Andrews
>
>Why do a lot of Australian email addresses have ".oz.au" ?
>
>I can see ".au" is for australia but what sub-domain does ".oz" refer to?
>
based addresses, unlike earlier versions of the SUN software.
OZ was deliberately chosen as a toplevel domain so that it would
not clash with more official toplevel domains, i.e. au/aus, but
would be recognizable Australian. It as always envisaged that OZ
would some day become a subdomain under AU/AUS. What was not
known was how far down it would be, i.e. oz.au vs. oz.net.au.
Domains ending in ".oz.au" are supposed be be reachable using
ACSnet (MHSnet its successor has a wider coverage).
If someone has archieves of news back when the change over was
occuring you can see the discussions that occured.
Mark
Chris Maltby
> When ACSnet (SUNIII) came into existance it supported domain
> based addresses, unlike earlier versions of the SUN software.
Indeed. Well ahead of the Internet at that time too. Mind you, SUNIII
domains were more a kind of host "adjective" than a hierarchical and
authoritative namespace division system. SUNIII still has this problem
to some extent.
> OZ was deliberately chosen as a toplevel domain so that it would
> not clash with more official toplevel domains, i.e. au/aus, but
> would be recognizable Australian. It as always envisaged that OZ
> would some day become a subdomain under AU/AUS. What was not
> known was how far down it would be, i.e. oz.au vs. oz.net.au.
No way. "oz" predates any choice of "au" to be Australia. In a sense
you could say that Robert Elz and his cronies chose "au" as the top
level domain for Australia just to make life difficult for ACSnet
sites which had already standardised on "oz". Now we have all this
com, edu, gov, csiro rubbish as well (:-).
> Domains ending in ".oz.au" are supposed be be reachable using
> ACSnet (MHSnet its successor has a wider coverage).
I won't argue with that. Though we have to keep on fending off the
imperial aspirations of Internet connected people who think that they
own the address space and can make the rules for "domains" like oz.
> If someone has archieves of news back when the change over was
> occuring you can see the discussions that occured.
I don't think much of this was discussed in news (except perhaps in
flames). It just happened...
I can tell you the REAL origin of oz though. It comes from the earliest
days of trans-pacific email exchange, when SUNII was the way to connect
UNIX boxes. We set up a link to Bell Labs from Sydney Uni via some
disgusting mailbox system, and the name of the pseudo mail destination
for the Bell Labs end of the connection was "oz" - as chosen by Ian
Johnstone (and/or Peter Ivanov) who were working there around that time.
This would be around 1979/1980, for those who think networking is new.
Chris
--
Chris Maltby - Softway Pty Ltd Internet: ch...@softway.sw.oz.au
PHONE: +61-2-698-2322 "I'm waiting for X-Windows to become just that;
FAX: +61-2-699-9174 Ex-Windows" - A McGrath.
Robert Elz
| In <Bw5D3...@syd.dms.CSIRO.AU> ma...@syd.dms.CSIRO.AU (Mark Andrews) writes:
| > OZ was deliberately chosen as a toplevel domain so that it would
| > not clash with more official toplevel domains, i.e. au/aus
| No way. "oz" predates any choice of "au" to be Australia.
Mark is right, though you're also right that oz predates "au" - at
the time, no-one (or none who were thinking about our naming anyway)
really knew what would happen to the country as a whole, but we did
know that ACSnet could never claim to be all of networking in Aust.
Remember that at the time the practice was just to put host names inside
oz in most cases, taking over something that might ever look like the
only domain for Australia would not have been reasonable.
| In a sense
| you could say that Robert Elz and his cronies chose "au" as the top
| level domain for Australia
Actually ISO chose AU, and I doubt they even knew about ACSnet (what's
more, I suspect they chose it, probably after consulting someone in
Aust, though I have no idea who, rather before ACSnet was invented).
For rationality, simplicity, and general good sense, the ISO country
names have been adopted by all of the various networks to use as
country designators (ie: X.400, etc, as well as the Internet).
| just to make life difficult for ACSnet sites which had already
| standardised on "oz".
I don't know that anyone ever consciously though of "oz" ending up
as sub-domain of "au" (or anything) back when it was adopted, but
we certainly knew that it wasn't going to be adequate for all of Aust
forever.
| Now we have all this com, edu, gov, csiro rubbish as well (:-).
That stuff was invented by the spearnet people (after internally
debating whether they preferred ac.au or edu.au) - remember?
We also have telememo.au and otc.au which map into X.400 domains
(run by Telecom and OTC). Choosing "oz" (though oz.au would have been
better, with hindsight) and deliberately knowing it wouldn't cover
all of Aust was one of the things we got right, and which has made
it possible to link the various early competing networks in Aust.
The (mostly previous now fortunately) situation in some countries,
where several networks each claimed to represent the country
domain, but none knew of, or would route to, hosts on the other
networks was a disaster.
| I won't argue with that. Though we have to keep on fending off the
| imperial aspirations of Internet connected people who think that they
| own the address space and can make the rules for "domains" like oz.
The internet don't want to make rules for oz - but they do, reasonably,
want to make rules for messages that use the internet - there do need
to be some conventions. One of the problems with ACSnet, and the uucp
net in the US, has always been that there are no written standards,
which means people end up debating with each other whether what one
site does is correct or not (Your message was unrelpiable from my
mailer, its format is wrong, please fix it! No, your code is broken,
what I did was just fine, fix your mailer!). Various code has various
assumptions about how messages should be processed, it would be a lot
easier to accomodate ACSnet if we knew what those assumptions were, and
everyone agreed with them - the internet seems to be applying its standards
to ACSnet not because of anything the internet (or the IETF) have done - I
doubt almost anyone there has ever even heard of ACSnet, but because people
here have largely adopted the Internet standards to use on ACSnet,
partly just to fill the void, and partly because that's what most of
the software they acquire assumes.
| I don't think much of this was discussed in news (except perhaps in
| flames). It just happened...
It was discussed.
| I can tell you the REAL origin of oz though.
My memory has never been able to tell me exactly who invented it, or
more accurately, just where the use of the name for networks originated,
its certainly in wide use other palces, and I'm willing to believe this
one - but remember that from the Bell Labs end our connection looked
kind of like a uucp site (though it was a mailbox on some IBM mainframe
at Waterloo) - I know here we called them "usa", I had a kind of
impression that messages coming back the other way used "aus". There
was (though probably not at that time) a US uucp site called "oz".
kre