Minnie's new domain name

Warren Toomey wkt at henry.cs.adfa.oz.au
Mon Nov 23 08:41:31 AEST 1998


In article by Michael Sokolov:
>    Dear Warren,
>    
>    I see you started changing *.adfa.oz.au to *.adfa.edu.au. Should we all
> start changing this in our notes, aliases, links, etc? And just out of
> curiosity, what's changing? What did OZ.AU mean? Did it mean Australian
> universities or what? Are you changing to EDU because that's what everyone
> else uses?
>    
>    And while we are at it, what's ADFA? I thought the school's name is
> UNSW, isn't it?

Hi Michael, yes I should put some email out. History lesson following....

Before the Internet reached Australia, the universities had a UUCP-based
mail/news system called ACSnet, where addresses were not bang-paths but
@-based. The ACSnet software did the route lookups. Anyway, all ACSnet
computers had a `domain' name ending in .oz, e.g kre at munnari.oz was a valid
email address.

When we finally got Internet-connected, our country suffix was .au. To
make the transition easier, we just tacked it on to the end of the existing
domain names, thus kre at munnari.oz became kre at munnari.oz.au

More recently, to bring Australia in line with Internet conventions, .oz.au
became .edu.au. Unfortunately, ADFA never bothered to do this switch until
mid-way through this year. Over the summer break, I'll add some smarts to
minnie's web server and other services to remind people to make the
switch in their bookmarks, hotlinks etc. I'll keep it running indefinitely.

ADFA is the Australian Defense Force Academy: it has military cadets as
undergrads and civilians as postgrads. One half is run by the University of
New South Wales and teaches normal civilian university stuff. I belong to
this half. The other half is run by Defence, and teaches military history,
how to shoot with guns etc. I'm not involved with that side at all :-)

Cheers all,
	Warren

P.S Minnie's 2nd hard disk wedged itself sometime over the weekend. It's
back now. I hate PC hardware.

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