[56376] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Why replicate the DNS?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric A. Hall)
Thu Mar 6 09:06:56 2003
Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2003 08:06:12 -0600
From: "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com>
To: Joe Abley <jabley@isc.org>
Cc: Michael.Dillon@radianz.com, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <7CE4AE6A-4F7F-11D7-A647-00039312C852@isc.org>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
on 3/5/2003 8:58 PM Joe Abley wrote:
> I think Bill's point was that if a distributed database is required to
> contain routing policy, why not use existing distributed database
> infrastructure to host it (i.e. the DNS).
> I think it is fair to say that the delegation chain in the DNS is
> demonstrably more effective in allowing authoritative records to be
> located than the ad-hoc partial-mesh of mirroring and key replication
> currently found in the IRR.
Delegation is different from content.
Using DNS for delegation information makes a lot of sense, but trying to
use it for complex content is just a bad idea. DNS is great for
lightweight fast lookups of public-access data, but its not well suited to
complex query structures, authenticated access, or multi-dimensional,
time-sensitive data.
As an analogy, everybody agrees that DNS should (must) be used for tasks
like ~find the mail server, but nobody should seriously argue that we
should use DNS to hold ~RFC822/MIME messages and entities.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
