12.3.24 What is the source of ".oz" as an internet addressrepresenting Australia?
Description
This article is from the soc.culture.australian FAQ, by Stephen Wales with numerous contributions by others.
12.3.24 What is the source of ".oz" as an internet addressrepresenting Australia?
(is it any different from ".au"; and why do some addresses have
".oz.au" both, or is that just harmless redundancy?)
[What follows is the combinations of comments from Robert Elz (KRE), Chris
Maltby (CM) and Piers Lauder (PL) which I hope I've integrated completely.
Any of you three gents may feel free to correct me if I've mucked it up -SW]
[KRE] No, its certainly not the same as AU, nor is it redundant
in addresses where it appears, its required, and can't be used in
others.
Long ago when we were first setting up addressing for Aust we
were always going to use domain addressing - this is way back
when xxx.arpa was the standard name for US hosts on the arpanet
(& milnet). That is, the use of domain names wasn't new, but
there was not yet any organised structure for domain naming (ie:
the edu, gov, ... and the two letter country names didn't yet
exist).
We knew we wanted a domain name that represented Australia in
some way, and things like AU and AUS were suggested, but we also
knew that our (then) small group of sites couldn't really ever
claim to represent all of Australia, and do anything that would
effectively take over the entire Australian namespace leaving
nothing for anyone else unless they could fit themselves into our
naming scheme.
I should also mention that at this time we were already using
domain names, the domain we used was "SUN" which meant "Sydney
Unix Network" (and sometimes "Sydney University Network") - the
Australian net was an outgrowth of a network that started in
Sydney at Sydney University, and linked UNIX systems. The
network started before Sun Microsystems was created - still they
asked us if we could use something other than "SUN" as our name -
and since our net was no longer just in Sydney, that seemed
reasonable (though the software used remained called "SUN" then
SunII and SunIII, until comparatively recently when SunIV was
renamed MHSnet).
[CM] The Australian use of domain tokens (they were more a hostname
adjective in the first implementation) was ahead even of the .arpa
stuff kre mentions above. I don't remember a "sun" domain, but there
were both hierarchical "domains" and non-hierarchical adjectives
which were intended to implement multicast delivery. I remember plans
to start a "news" adjective and to disseminate netnews to *.news, which
the SUN software would do efficiently. The "oz" domain also had the
meaning of "sites with an interest in global level routing" - if you
were the gateway to your site you had to belong to "oz". When kre
tried to connect Thailand he had many problems because the software
at that time made assumptions about ".oz" being somehow global.
[KRE - in response to "I don't remember a "sun" domain"]
It existed, but I'm not sure how visible it ever was inside Aust.
This may have only ever been added here on messages exported to
the world - I think it dates from about SUN II days, when domains
didn't exist at all on ACSnet. If I hunted really hard I could
probably still find the message from Bill Shannon asking us to
stop using that name...
[PL] The SUN (II/III) software allowed a node to have as many domains as
it liked, but one of them had to be nominated as the "primary" for the purpose
of making routing calculations more efficient - if the domain was "su"
for instance, the routing tables only needed to know about other nodes
in "su". The Thailand problem was due to a bug in SUNIII, rather than any
built-in knowledge about "oz" being special.
As an aside, it's worth noting that the SUN in Sun Microsystems stands
for "Stanford University Network".
[KRE] In any case, needing a name, something Australian, but not to
pretend to represent the whole of Australia, someone (it
certainly wasn't me, but I don't recall who) suggested "oz".
That sounds like the "Aus" part of "Australia" or "Aussie" when
spoken by an Australian (rather than an American, who pronounce
the thing in some totally wild way), and is fairly commonly used
by various people to represent things Australian (and has no
relationship I know of with the wizard), and was adopted.
[CM] In the great tradition of Unix, we selected "oz" because it was in
common usage in Australia and was shorter to type than any alternative.
[KRE] Eventually, the two letter country naming stuff was invented, and
AU of course became Australia - the "oz" part, which was always
just a subset of Australia fitted very neatly as a sub-domain of
AU, and so that's what was done with it. In time, other
sub-domains of AU were created, including the edu.au com.au etc
domains, that serve basically the same community as oz.au does,
but also telememo.au and otc.au (which match the X.400 naming
"ADMD=telememo; C=au") that are used by commercial e-mail systems
in Australia, which has retrospectively justified the decision to
confine our naming within a subset of the Australian namespace,
and not even pretend to take over the whole thing.
There's another version of the "creation of oz" story, which
relates to the very first international e-mail connection that
the academic community had here, which ran between the University
of Sydney (home of the Sydney University/Unix Network) and Bell
Labs. It was implemented using a maildrop on an IBM mainframe at
the University of Waterloo in Canada, Bell labs would dial there,
and leave mail for Australia in a file, then the University of
Sydney would call, using X.25, and pick up the mail in the file,
and leave another for Bell Labs the next time they called. This
was set up by Ian Johnstone, initially from UNSW, but then at
Bell Labs - the theory is that "oz" was the name of the account
at Waterloo, or one of the file names, or something like that.
This may indeed be what sparked the suggestion to use "oz" as the
domain name, I don't know, I certainly don't recall that name
being in any visible use in that e-mail system though, whatever
use it had, if there was one, must have been internal I think.
[CM] In support of this story, it's important to note that ianj is close
to being the worst typist I have ever seen. "oz" is close to the
limit for him! Also, Bell Labs were using UUCP to deliver their end
to the gateway, and "oz!address" worked well at their end. At our end
we had only one site to mail to, so "user@usa" was sufficient.
Finally, "oz" still has a special meaning - although some of the .oz
sites are fully connected to the Internet. There is an assumption that
if you are called something.oz.au that you will maintain some sort of
ACSnet connectivity (even via an SMTP gateway), so that sites which
have only MHSnet software can work out from the address whether to
attempt internal delivery. Until AARNet began charging for MX address
registrations, kre had a rule for *.oz.au which merely inserted the
incoming message into ACSnet for delivery.
[PL] No, this isn't true anymore, there are now many sites running SUN IV
that aren't in "oz.au" -- more likely "com.au" these days. Deciding
whether a site needs message delivery via SMTP or something else is
now done based on address tables specifying the delivery method.
[KRE] It is so true...
Though its not clear which part of Chris' paragraph you're
rejecting, you're right that's there's no longer any generic
*.oz.au -> ACSnet rule (but Chris did say "had") - but it is true
that xxx.oz.au -> ACSnet. The reason for that has nothing
to do with the Internet, but with ACSnet - there are still lots
of sites (on ACSnet) that simply dump *.oz.au messages (as *.oz)
into ACSnet and assume they will be delivered. Whenever a site
with an oz.au name leaves ACSnet and relies on MX stuff for mail
to be delivered (which works fine on the Internet) I get mail
from ACSnet sites asking what happened to them...
Note this doesn't imply (and hasn't since MHSnet) that sites
on ACSnet have to have oz.au names, anything legal that works
is OK - just that oz.au sites have to be on ACSnet.
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