Re: [homenet] Lars Eggert's Abstain on draft-ietf-homenet-naming-architecture-dhc-options-22: (with COMMENT)

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 7:45 AM Lars Eggert via Datatracker <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> I agree with the Discusses and Comments on this document - this simply
> isn't
> implementable as described.
>

I have no opinion on this per sé, but...


> My main reason for abstaining is something else though. This document has
> been
> worked on for almost ten years. While in the beginning, we might have
> expected
> or at least hoped that a solution in the shape that this document tries to
> describe would see adoption, it's become very clear that dynamic DNS
> services
> as described in Section 4 have won out here. These services are far from
> perfect, but at least some of the limitations in Section 4 have been
> addressed,
> and others are arguably a feature and not a limitation.


I'm deeply frustrated by this response. I think it's good to pay attention
to whether there could be market pressure for a given protocol, but when
the market has solved a related problem badly, this doesn't seem like a
good reason to say no to an actual solution to the problem. If you think
the document isn't any good, ask the authors to fix it, and don't publish
it until they do.

What the market has produced is a way for a user to subscribe to a service
that lets them keep a single domain name current with their external IP
address. It doesn't let them populate a DNS zone that they control with
arbitrary records. There exists no solution to that problem in the market
other than setting up your own DNS server and getting a delegation through
a registrar (which many of us who participate in the IETF do) or paying
somebody like godaddy to do it for you (which is mostly what non-experts
do).

Making it easier seems like a good thing. That's what this document
proposes to do. If it does it badly, or the wrong way, then you should be
able to criticize it on that basis. Not on the basis that, for a
substantial monthly fee, I can maintain the association between a single
name not of my choosing and the very-much-not-stable single IPv4 address
that my ISP provides to me.