On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 04:18:22PM +1100, Chris Disspain wrote:
> oz.au was one of the second level domains set up by the original .au
> 'manager' or 'delegate, Robert Elz. He created it along with all the
> ones you know and love such as com.au, net.au etc.

And some others like telememo.au, conf.au and maybe more.

> There does not appear to be a clear history of what policy applied to
> oz.au names (if someone has a reference to some policy from the past,
> please let us know) and when auDA took over the .au delegation it
> appeared that oz.au was obsolete in the sense that no names appear to
> have been issued for some time. That does not, of course, mean that
> existing oz.au names are not around and in use. They clearly are.

It's a 2ld which preceeds the need for a strict policy. If you go look
for papers on ACSnet you'll find a lot of background on how it operated.
Its addressing system was an X.400 style typed hierarchy which mapped
nicely onto DNS when that got going. At one time there were quite a few
com.au and edu.au DNS domains that were reached by ACSnet dialup links.

It was a co-operative structure - for years we maintained a modem link
with Sydney Uni (ACSnet developers) on that basis. We only decommissioned
it last year when the portserver box died of old age. (We switched
to a TCP link to maintain the historical continuity.) That meant that
there was a self-regulatory system for choosing and registering names,
just like in the old days for all domains. AFAIK you can still register
oz.au names if you can find an ACSnet peer and can work out how to
install and configure the MHSnet software, and you can convince kre that
you're legit.

Chris