Re: [homenet] homenet "no host changes" assumption and DNS

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 01:21:06PM +0000, STARK, BARBARA H wrote:

> Currently, there is no host that expects to use .home.arpa (or any other domain) inside the premises.

I don't think the "or any other domain" claim is true.  At the very
least, _lots_ of hosts are already using local. in homenets -- indeed,
that's how we got to this pass.

> There is no host that expects a general-purpose in-home domain name system to work or be present.

That's because there is no host that "expects an in-home domain name
system" at all.  I think your position is starting from a position
with which I disagree pretty strongly.  In my view, what we did many
years ago was hook up individual machines to an ISP's network.  When
broadband home access came along, we continued to pretend that the
link in the CPE was just a node in an ISP's network, and pretended
that the home network was not a first-class network that was
internetworked together with other networks to make the Internet.  We
ended up with multiple classes of network, some of which are only
kinda part of the Internet.

The reason that homenet is being worked on in the IETF as opposed to,
say, the Broadband Forum, is exactly that we are trying to provide
internetworking services for these surprisingly sophisticated,
unmanaged networks.  So to say that there's no "general-purpose
in-home domain name system" misses the point: it's _the_ domain name
system, and the homenet is part of that global DNS just as surely as
com. is, and participates in the global name space just as surely as
onion. and local. do.

So, the reason we can't expect host changes for naming is because any
plan for internetworking that starts, "First, upgrade all the hosts,"
is doomed.  That hasn't worked since 1983.

> If we got rid of the "no changes to host" tenet (for hosts that can make use of the home naming architecture), that would give us much more freedom to create an in-home DNS architecture without a dependency on homenet routers implementing the DNS Proxy kludge. Or any other kludge. It would let us create an architecture that would finally start to move us away from DNS Proxy and other methods that intercept DNS queries to make supposedly "intelligent" decisions on behalf of stupid hosts. And we would not be further entrenching use of these DNS intercept functions.
> 

I don't understand how you can claim the above: the plain fact of the
matter is that we have multiple domain-name-using protocols in action
here: at the very least, mDNS, DNS, and LLMNR, and maybe Tor
resolution and some other stuff.  If what you're saying instead is
that hosts are supposed to know which networking context they're
living in, then perhaps we need a radical rethinking of what we're
working on.  It _might_ be the case that end to end is the wrong model
given the kinds of things we turn out to be attaching to the Internet
(this was part of what got discussed in the IAB's technical plenary
last November).  But if that's what we're doing, I think this WG needs
at the very least to go through a round of rechartering so that the
rest of the IETF understands that we are proposing a really
significant break with the nominal Internet architecture.  I'm not
convinced that the WG has the patience to do such an effort, BTW.  But
I think this is a pretty fundamental change you're proposing, and I
think it would not be wrong for the IETF to push back pretty hard
against such a change should the WG come out with documents that embed
such an assumption.

> I would like to require the hosts that want to make use of the new homenet naming architecture responsible for understanding the different provisioning domains and simultaneously launching queries to the advertised (or internally configured) DNS servers for each provisioning domain. 
> 

DNS doesn't work that way, is the problem.  It doesn't have a mode
bit.  What you are proposing is homenet-DNS; it's a new protocol.
Maybe that's the right answer, but I'm far from convinced that this is
the place to create DNSbis.

Best regards,

A
-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]