Re: [dnsext] afasterinternet.com trial and draft-vandergaast-edns-client-subnet-00

[Wilmer van der Gaast <[e-mail]>]

On 30 August 2011 17:21, Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> It appears to us that you are undertaking a trial deployment of
> draft-vandergaast-edns-client-subnet-00, and that you are soliciting
> people to participate in the client portion of this trial.  We think
> this is, in effect, a limited public trial on the public Internet.
>
It's not really a public trial on the public Internet. It's merely a
group of open resolvers and a few CDNs who all implemented support for
edns-client-subnet in their systems and start to use it amongst just
each other. The resolvers use a whitelist to make sure the option only
goes to nameservers that expect it.

Our goal here, speaking as the authors of the I-D, is to get some
real-world numbers on how effective edns-client-subnet really is.
Unfortunately my memories of our conversation at IETF78 (Maastricht)
are pretty vague by now, but IIRC there was some interest for these
numbers.

Unfortunately we got sidetracked by our day jobs and didn't have much
time to work on this data or the I-D in general - but do intend to
allocate more time for it over the next months.

> We are aware of the obstacles to obtaining such an option code, but we
> believe that the benefits of a faster Internet, which you are avowedly
> attempting to deliver, will only really be benefits if they don't
> break others' software, either now or in the future.

I fully agree. By picking 0x50fa instead of a lower value (it looks
like so far EDNS0 options are assigned sequentially) we certainly
tried to avoid any problems of this kind. Our plan was to use this
temporary option code just to gather data, and with that and a
published experimental RFC, get an official number from IANA. Not at
any time did we intend to sidestep the IETF process. Apologies if we
gave that impression.

Our latest I-D <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-subnet-00>
has just expired and we have no updates to it. Also there has been
very little (none, from what I can remember) discussion on dnsext
about it. We welcome any help you can offer to make this I-D suitable
for publication on the experimental track.


Kind regards,


Wilmer van der Gaast,
Carlo Contavalli.