[35912] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Multiple Roots are "a good thing" - Karl Auerbach
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Simon Higgs)
Mon Mar 19 00:05:39 2001
Message-Id: <5.0.2.1.2.20010318202136.042acd60@oak.higgs.net>
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 20:32:21 -0800
To: nanog@merit.edu (North America Network Operators Group Mailing List)
From: Simon Higgs <simon@higgs.com>
Cc: Leah Gallegos <jandl@jandl.com>,
Karl Auerbach <karl@CAVEBEAR.COM>
In-Reply-To: <20010318204704.40B8D8C@proven.weird.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 03:47 PM 3/18/01 -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > I would suggest that telephone books/directories are not an appropriate
> > analogy. Rather, DNS is a lot closer to the internal plumbing of the net -
> > more akin to Signalling System #7. I'd guess that for 95% or more of phone
> > calls, the caller already knows the numeric phone number in question -
> > while for the Internet, very few people give their email addresses as
> > mfidelman@207.226.172.79 or http://207.226.172.79. Telephone directories
> > are optional in most cases, DNS is not.
>
>You are absolutely correct. :-)
>
>Telephone directories are most definitely *not* like the DNS.
I don't get this argument at all. A telephone white pages lookup takes a
name [a-z + 0-9] and looks up a number [0-9]. DNS does exactly the same
thing. The only difference is a hierarchical naming convention in DNS which
specifies/delegates where the information is stored. The information could
reside in the same place, or be distributed.
>A directory is something that
>can be searched with approximate matches. Because the DNS is
>"D"istributed, it is literally impossible search it that way (and if
>there were multiple roots then all users would really be up the creek
>without the proverbial paddle!).
DNS can be searched up, down and sideways. It may change the normal query
method or add additional transactions to a lookup, but it can be searched
and indexed. The questions are "does the index scale" and "does it matter"?
Best Regards,
Simon Higgs
--
It's a feature not a bug...
