Re: [dnsext] we need help to make names the same, was draft-yao-dnsext-identical-resolution-02 comment

["John R. Levine" <[e-mail]>]

> The number of these domain names varies from two (or four if a final sigma
> is present) to some tens of domains, not millions and certainly not
> billions.

Well, yes, but that's in one component.  If someone has a name A.B.C.gr, 
where each of A B C has ten variants, now there's a thousand equivalent 
names.  I would think that a design that handled the variants in C but not 
in A and B is not worth implementing.

If you only care about C, you can do that with bundling, have the registry 
assign all variants of a requested name to the registrant, and let the 
registrant deal with making them the same, by copies of the zone.  It's 
not particularly elegant, but it requires no changes to existing protocol 
and the software is not very complicated.

> We asked for a DNS rr that will allow two, three, four, or tens of 
> chosen domain names to act as if they were interchangeable in all the 
> branches of the domain name tree, starting from the top. They could be 
> perfectly normal Latin domain names that point to the same services and 
> the administrator decides to administer them as one.

Except that, as often noted, if the servers they point to don't have some 
way to discover that the names are intended to be equivalent, the services 
won't work.  The assumptions so far seem to be either that the services 
are something like telnet that doesn't care what its name is, or that 
they'll be manually provisioned, which seems unlikely to work except in 
the tiniest cases.

Regards,
John Levine, [e-mail], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly