--On 27 February 2007 23:24:45 +0000 Jason_Meers
<Jason_Meers@???> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> 1) I'm working on some new exim documentation and have been trying to
> decide on which domain names to use for:
>
> - An example local domain
> - An example domain(s) that I will relay/smarthost for
> - An example external domain(s) that is not part of my mail system
>
> I have read http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2606.html which offers me the
> following SLD's:
> example.com
> example.net
> example.org
> but these don't seem distinct enough or unrelated enough and could
> easily be misread/misunderstood. And I really don't want to use
> subdomains of example.com as if they were separate and unassociated
> sites or organizations to example.com.
>
> the other TLD options are:
> .test
> .example
> .invalid
> .localhost
> which seem unfamiliar (because they are reserved, hence nobody ever sees
> them in day-to-day web browsing)
>
> Has anybody done this before or know of any "generally accepted" ways of
> doing this. I was previously using made up domains like "mydomain.com"
> and "anothercompany.com" but these are risky as most are already
> legitimately in use by other companies (not good if somebody follows the
> examples to the letter)
example.com, and so on, are quite widely used in documentation. If you want
to further distinguish them, you could use subdomains. I think these are
quite a good choice for a general audience, and just as good as
"*.example". I guess there's a problem whereby one might be tempted to
assume that "example.com" and "example.org" represent domains registered to
the same entity, because some entities do exactly that.
I wouldn't use ".test" or ".invalid" or ".localhost" except where they
really are examples of test, invalid or local domains. It might be that
"foo.example" and "bar.example" are less likely assumed to be related. They
these types of domain are used in the Exim book, and I think it works quite
well - the cognitive dissonance of seeing a domain like that tends to wake
me up!
--
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
