[DNSOP] Re: Side Meeting - DNS Load Balancing

[Dave Lawrence <[e-mail]>]

Paul Vixie writes:
> somebody asked me a few months ago why "it's always dns"? meaning,
> why are so  many mysteries and outages ultimately traced down to
> something broken in dns?

Personally, even despite having the relevant haiku as my desktop
background, I push back on this when it rears its head.  I mean, even
ignoring the trouble with absolutes like "always", which can rapidly
be disproven.

The DNS is remarkably robust.  Even when a problem can be "ultimately
traced down to something broken in the dns", it is often not the DNS
itself that was broken.  It frequently did a wonderful job of
providing the answers it was told to provide.  Sometimes it even did
so heroically while under assault.  And, of course, many times the
problematic answers had nothing whatsoever to do with Stupid DNS
Tricks(tm).

So why is it perceived to be "always dns"?  Because the DNS stands at
an incredibly important juncture between people and machines.  That
interface is a concentrator and bound to be where failures on one side
or the other become visible.  That should be the answer to a non-DNS
person asking why it always seems to be the DNS, not harping on the
particular sub-developments that we don't care for.

It can be fun to joke about, but please let's not feed the narrative
that the DNS as a whole is pitifully flawed.  Even with (despite?) the
features that you dislike, it still has done an amazing job as a
fundamental piece of the amazing technological advancement that has
been the Internet.