Re: Last Call: 'Linklocal Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR)' to Proposed Standard

Margaret Wasserman <margaret@thingmagic.com> writes:

> Other than a few minor issues that are being dealt with in a -43 update,
> I don't think that anyone has raised a blocking technical issue with the
> LLMNR specification during this IETF LC.  If you (or anyone else) has
> intended to raise a blocking technical issue, either with LLMNR itself
> or with its ability to coexist with mDNS, please make that clearer to
> me.

I'm getting the impression from the IETF list discussion that several
people do consider the behavior of querying regular DNS first for names
that will be handled by LLMNR to be a blocking technical issue.  I'm not
sure that I've reached the point where I would say that personally, but
the descriptions here have at least been concerning.

I think it is very useful to have a clear distinction between DNS
namespaces, with one namespace clearly identified as being link-local so
that people are not under the impression that they can use arbitrary DNS
domains for link-local resolution and so that software knows not to try to
resolve link-local names against regular DNS servers.  It sounds like mDNS
does this as part of the protocol specification.

> On the other hand, the DNSEXT WG has worked for several years to produce
> the LLMNR specification, and I don't see anything fundamentally wrong
> with the mechanism that we have produced (people should respond to the
> IETF LC if they see blocking technical issues). The authors of that
> specification gave change control to the IETF community, and they have
> gone through 40+ document iterations, working towards a document that
> would achieve DNSEXT consensus.  That process was not followed for mDNS
> (because it was not the chosen solution), and we currently only have one
> document (LLMNR) that has reached IETF WG consensus and has been
> submitted for standards publication.

As near as I can tell, the authors of the mDNS specification also gave
change control to the IETF community, so I wouldn't raise that as a
distinction.  The only distinction appears to be working group consensus;
the protocols otherwise look to be in the same place legally and
process-wise.

> It is possible, in an IETF LC, that we could learn that we do not have
> IETF consensus to publish something that was produced by an IETF WG.

At the moment, based on the discussion in the IETF list, I don't believe
that LLMNR should be published on the standards track unless mDNS is also
being published on the standards track and we agree we really want to have
two standards for this (which I think everyone is agreed would be bad).
Publishing them both as experimental and then seeing which gains more
general acceptance and works better in practice sounds reasonable to me.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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