[H-GEN] Are host names allowed to start with a numeric identifier?

[Raymond Smith]

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On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Raymond Smith wrote:
> Are hostnames allowed to start with numeric identifiers? I am about to
> trawl through RFCs but if someone out there can quote the number for
> me... well it will help my pedantry.

The inimitable Mark Suter reminded me of the hostname '3com.com'. While
RFC 1035 does say that the prefferred syntax is to not start with a digit
implementations should be able to cope with it.

Of course, it looks like my customer's platform's libraries dopn't
somewhere. And now I can only say 'it would be better if you didn't call
your hosts 238A1' instead of 'Muhahahaha! You are not RFC compliant I cast
thee into outer darkness until thou atones'.

:-)

Raymond


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