[66362] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Upcoming change to SOA values in .com and .net zones
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Owen DeLong)
Thu Jan 8 11:36:43 2004
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 08:35:54 -0800
From: Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.2.20040107173753.0502a140@127.0.0.1>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
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--On Wednesday, January 7, 2004 5:43 PM -0800 "Martin J. Levy"=20
<mahtin@mahtin.com> wrote:
>
>
>> There should be no end-user impact resulting from these changes ...
>
> I believe there have been 26 (opps, now 27) responses to this
> announcement in the last 2 hours 45 minutes, that's about one response
> every 6 minutes.
>
> Hence there seems to be at least some impact on the community and that's
> before these changes are even implemented. :-)
>
> Martin
>
I never expected to find myself defending Verisign, but, in this case, I
have to point out the following:
1. Most of the flap has been people demonstrating that they
don't understand the effect of the change. On a technical
level, all that _SHOULD_ care about the zone serial number
is the slave servers that are authoritative for the zone.
2. Some of the flap has been from people that can't read and
seemed to think that the change was for Jan 9 instead of
Feb. 9.
3. Some of the flap was from people who thought that the serial
number going backwards was a serious operational issue.
4. Some of the response to 3 was from people who didn't realize
that the serial number really was going to go backwards.
5. Eventually, the fact that this didn't matter was pointed out
by some.
I don't see any real reason for Verisign to do this, other than possibly=20
some
lazy coding in automation tools (that SN is slightly easier to use as a
timestamp in automation than one that is the encoded date). It doesn't=20
provide
the functionality they are striving for.
However, I don't see any meaningful reason for them not to do this either.
Having said that, I think that, for once, they actually did provide
reasonable notification of the change, and, were extra helpful showing
the simple perl conversion from new-format serial number to timestamp.
I think we should be praising them for this, accepting that it is a minor
change, and appreciating the actual advance notice.
I think we should make it clear that we as a community are not a band
of engineers opposed to changes for the sake of opposing change and keep
it clear that there were real operational impact reasons to oppose the
wildcard records. This change isn't worth opposing, and, at least they
gave us reasonable notice on it. We should move on.
Just my $0.02, but, I think we should declare this horse dead.
Owen
--=20
If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.
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