Sites

A Site might also be called an Administrative Domain or an Area. The idea is that when you're setting up the hosts for a network say for a company, you're setting up a Site. All those hosts go together, are administered together, are all interconnected without going outside the Site, and connect to the rest of the net through a few border gateways.

You give your Site a name (probably a string) that each machine in the Site knows. This name only has to be unique with respect to all neighboring Sites. The purpose to the name is that each host or router can talk to its neighbors and determine if it's on the border and take appropriate action. All rest of the configuration should be automatic.

Note: There might be some advantage to the name being unique on a larger scope than just the neighbor Sites. For instance, if you border two Sites that don't border each other, it might be useful if you could tell by name inspection that they were different. But it's not necessary since you can ask for the map server from both and see if you end up at the same place. For ease of configuration it's better not to have this requirement.

One important point about Sites, they are not hierarchical. Sites are peers. Sites do not contain other Sites. See Coalitions.

Protocols

Open Questions

Suppose you're a mobile computer and you plug into a remote network. Should you be a single machine Site or should you join the new Site but still be registered in your original naming zone. I'm not sure how that should work until we have more details about both Site protocols and the Naming System. No doubt security considerations also play a big part.