"Erik E. Fair" writes:
> A domain name can, in principle, be arbitrarily long.

No it can't.

RFC1034 says:

   To simplify implementations, the total number of octets that represent a
   domain name (i.e., the sum of all label octets and label lengths) is
   limited to 255.

Note that this doesn't translate into a "clean" length limit, but it
means that the ultimate maximum is under 255 octets.

Perry