From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxa!mhb5c!mhb5b!cbosgd!mark Newsgroups: net.news Title: Re: Long system names Article-I.D.: cbosgd.3152 Posted: Mon Feb 21 13:34:31 1983 Received: Wed Feb 23 04:41:27 1983 References: <979@tektronix.UUCP> One word of caution about allowing longer host names. There is no problem with a return mailing address or path having a name longer than 8 characters in it. In fact, it was silly to truncate them to 8 in the first place, but it was done in order to assure that article ID's, which looked like sysname.##### would fit in 14 characters. It is important to insure that the article ID's you generate are no longer than 14 chars long, because some systems (notably A news) use them as file names to store the article in. Message ID's, which replace article ID's, won't have this restriction. But if you do install the long name code posted to net.sources, please make sure that you also fix the routine that generates article ID's (genident, I think) to truncate at 8.