Re: [dnsext] Re: I-D ACTION:draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-00.txt

[Olafur Gudmundsson <[e-mail]>]

At 18:56 27/01/2010, Wilmer van der Gaast wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>I spoke to Olafur about this idea in Hiroshima last year. I'm afraid
>the deadline for Anaheim already passed, but we hope we can discuss it
>on-line in the meantime and decide if it should become a WG item in
>Maastricht later this year.

<dnsex-chair-hat=on>

For the record, Wilmer and I had a discussion on how to submit Internet
drafts, and why the draft he was proposing was had to be submitted
as independent submission. I did no endorse or discourage this idea.

</dnsext-chair-hat=off>

>To summarize the I-D: It specifies an EDNS0 option that carries IP
>address information (by default only the first 24 bits to preserve
>privacy) of the user that triggered a DNS resolution. This should
>allow authoritative nameservers that give geo-targeted responses to be
>more accurate, even in cases where the resolver and its users aren't
>close to each other. To preserve the ability to cache such responses
>efficiently, the option in the response can indicate which exact
>subnet it should be cached for.

>Comments are more than welcome.

<no-hat>
In the introduction the term "sub-optimal" is used with out defining
for who and in what context, traffic delay or content. Just because a
computer happens to have an IP address that is registered to be in
Austria does not mean that I'm interested in any Austrian content
when I visit a news site like Reuters.com.

Some people made the not-always-correct assumption that addresses on
DNS questions are an good/decent/reasonable indicator of location.
That does not mean it is DNS protocol role to make their life easier
or to fix their misconception.

The proposal in the draft moves almost all the cost of fixing the
"problem" to the Recursive resolvers. Both by adding the option to the
queries, and by the onerous requirement to fragment their internal cache
based on source address of the stub-resolvers.
This moves the cost of solving the "problem" from the CDN providers to the
recursive resolvers operators, and I question if that is fair or justified.

As Ed Lewis keeps saying "We need problem statements, before proposed 
solutions" and this draft fails to convince me there is a problem that
is worth the working groups time or the mailing list bandwidth.


<dnsext-chair-hat=on>
The open question for the working group is the following:
"Is it one of DNS roles to provide information on where the query
originated from?"

If the answer is yes then we can take on some work in this area.

         Olafur