Re: Comments surrounding draft-iab-dns-applications-01

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

>It's hard to make comments on a document whose mission is not at all 
>clear.  The problem I have is that the document has a faulty baseline 
>and incorrectly assesses extensions and variations. ...

My experience with the DNS is nowhere near as deep as Ed's but having
done my share of DNS hackery (production special purpose DNS servers
written in perl), I have to agree with him.  This document starts by
conflating the DNS and applications built on top of the DNS, and goes
downhill from there.  I agree that there have been some pretty crufty
applications built on top of the DNS, but that cruftitude doesn't
affect the simple query and answer that the DNS does underneath.

The two points that do seem to apply to the DNS are, as Ed said,
larger responses and split horizon DNS.  Both of those have been
around for at least a decade without causing the world to collapse,
and neither is going away, particularly as DNSSEC becomes real, so
I don't understand what problem is to be solved.

So my advice would be to back up and write down in one or two
sentences what problem this document is supposed to fix or at least
describe, and then see how much of the rest of it might be salvaged.

This might be also a good time to write a DNS architecture document
analogous to Dave Crocker's mail architecture, that shows the layering
of the queries to authoritative servers, queries to caches, and the
applications built on top of them such as locating mail servers and
doing whatever NAPTR and DDNS do.

Regards,
John Levine, [e-mail], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly