[9466] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Root Name Server Confederations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean M. Doran)
Thu May 22 08:24:05 1997
To: Paul A Vixie <paul@vix.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
From: smd@clock.org (Sean M. Doran)
Date: 22 May 1997 08:17:56 -0400
In-Reply-To: Paul A Vixie's message of Tue, 20 May 1997 16:15:17 -0700
Paul A Vixie <paul@vix.com> writes:
> makes one long for the days of HOSTS.TXT. which was at least reliable and
> coherent. maybe it'll make a comeback in the form of everybody-run-their-own
> "." server.
Hey, I take it back, a PVM-must-die thread on NANOG hasn't
happened in a long time. Maybe NANOG isn't _utterly_
useless (only mostly)...
> i guess i've said this about 900 times now. DNS is a coherent, distributed
> database. don't do anything that will make it less
> coherent.
Kill it outright. Build something that doesn't use the
unreliable datagram protocol with all of its wonderful
deficiencies, perhaps leaving the description of the
database itself to the implementors (concentrating on
protocol instead), and ideally avoiding the in-addr.arpa
botch and the difficulties of scaling really large zones.
Denninger and company are wonderful because they are
forcing some issues which go right back to the days of
HOSTS.TXT and the ARPA zone. I seriously hope they are
able to forestall the insufficient bandaid approaches
being proposed by more moderate technical people.
> start back in on things that will make the same name mean something different
> (or become meaningless) depending on where you're standing when you resolve
> it.
But this is a really neat idea; have the DNS or its
follow-on(s) represent _services_ and the utility of having
this feature is fairly obvious. This is to some extent
how NATs work, after all.
A complaint about how '<port>.<zone>.<zone>...' can
lead to confusion is a complaint about the lack of
directory services through one can find a service in the
first place.
Sean.
