Re: Discovering LDAP Services with DNS - draft-ietf-ldapext-locate-03.txt

[Scott Seligman <Scott.Seligman@eng.Sun.COM>]

"Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org> writes:
>
> FQDN:
> 
> I noticed the specification now has trailing dots on FQDNs.  This
> may be inappropriate.  IIRC, the trailing dot is a user interface
> convention and not part of the actual DNS protocol itself.

To be precise the DNS protocol doesn't make use of dots within domain
names at all, but that's not really relevant.  The same RFC that
specifies the protocol (RFC 1035) also specifies a text format to be
used for domain names in master files, and it is this format that we
generally think of when we think of DNS names.  This format does
specify the use of trailing dots as follows:

    Domain names that end in a dot are called absolute, and are taken as
    complete.  Domain names which do not end in a dot are called relative;
    the actual domain name is the concatenation of the relative part with
    an origin....


Scott Seligman
Java Software Engineering
Sun Microsystems