Re: [DNSOP] abandoning ANAME and standardizing CNAME at apex

[Jared Mauch <[e-mail]>]

> On Jun 19, 2018, at 11:24 AM, Ray Bellis <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On 19/06/2018 15:43, tjw ietf wrote:
> 
>> I find it personally appalling we can spend so many cycles injecting
>> dns into http but we can’t be bothered to fix what end users want.
> 
> It's the HTTP folks that are putting most of those cycles into DNS into
> HTTP.
> 
> It's also their intransigence re: SRV which has caused the CNAME at the
> Apex issue.   CNAME was *never* the right answer for doing application
> level indirection in HTTP space.

Throw some shade at SMTP as well, if I send mail to [e-mail] and that pointed to @nether.net it would end up as @nether.net in the messages :-)

Part of it is just the human nature of how we debug things.  I can speak HTTP because it was easy to type telnet localhost 80.  These days I have to do the same thing but with openssl s_client etc.. 

If these methods to debug weren’t so hard, it would have gone much further to helping.  Developers/users want easy debugging steps and what we give them is things like the ednscomp tool, which is technically awesome but not very user friendly.  Instead of doing a dig on the port test tool, it’s much easier to visit https://cmdns.dev.dns-oarc.net/ instead.  I also may not have dig on my phone.. (ok, well I do).

I think a lot can be learned from how Apple (as an example) made simpler APIs to do connections vs doing  gethostbyname()^wgetaddrinfo().  It makes it easier to build tools if you don’t have to learn how to do all these things.  I really like Unix, the simplicity of many calls in C, but sometimes hiding the internal layers is what’s needed.  This is why https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsurlconnection?changes=_2 is a thing.

This is why folks are doing what tjw says, “meh, go to route53 because it does what I expect”.

This doesn’t mean the internals aren’t important, but many application developers and end-users can’t be expected to know/care about how a CNAME at apex differs from an A record w/ redirector.

One thing that SMTP got right was MX records, so it’s easier to say “go over here”.  While I’m sure someone will say that HTTP should have it’s own (eg: SRV) but the barn door is still open, etc..

- jared