Re: [mif] Last Call for MIF DNS server selection document

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On Sep 8, 2011, at 5:02 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> Teemu,
> 
> On 2011-09-08 18:16, [e-mail] wrote:
>> Brian,
>> 
>> Thank you for review. I agree it is a good idea to consult those WGs (and
>> DHC as well I suppose), but what makes you so concerned of this text:
>> 
>>>>   In deployments where multiple namespaces are present, selection of
>>>>   correct route and destination and source addresses for the actual IP
>>>>   connection is crucial as well, as the resolved destination's IP
>>>>   addresses may be only usable on the network interface over which the
>>>>   name was resolved on.
>> 
>> I wrote that as I thought it would be useful to talk a little about bigger
>> picture of some deployments (like in the demo we had few IETFs back -
>> without presence of DHCPv6 more specific route options the system would not
>> have worked properly) .. but if that text creates an unwanted link or
>> dependency or confusion, I think we can drop the text just as well and focus
>> on the document just to the new options and leave this kind of additional
>> system-level consideration out of the doc.
> 
> As Andrew pointed out, the draft starts
> 
>   "...from the premise that operators sometimes include private
>    namespaces in the answers they provide from DNS servers, and that
>    those private namespaces are at least as useful to clients as the
>    answers from the public DNS."
> 
> I believe that you will discover during IETF LC that many people have
> strong feelings about this premise; as Andrew implied, conceptually
> the DNS is a unified global namespace. This draft is a backdoor
> way of legitimising an ambiguous namespace. I don't think that will
> have an easy time in IETF LC, especially if it is dropped as a surprise
> into the DNS community. It's your choice, but I would suggest that
> exposing it to the DNS WGs now would be a smart move.


Frankly, I consider this very nearly a showstopper, in the sense that MIF needs an extremely good reason to do this, and I haven't seen even a hint of such a reason.    You may recall that I raised this issue in Quebec, though perhaps I was too polite about it.  (Since I hadn't read the document yet, and was coming late into the discussion, I wanted to give the group the benefit of the doubt.)

I'm quite surprised that MIF was able to get this far with the document without the issue being raised.    I'm shocked that this issue appears to be a surprise to the WG.  I think that by itself is likely a sign of a serious process or management failure.

> It goes further. The IETF has a longstanding issue with technology
> that encourages walled gardens. See for example RFC 3002. I think
> there will be quite some discussion, and this will definitely
> happen even if you try to remove the "system-level" considerations,
> because they are strongly implied anyway.
> 
> Personally I'm not sure what I think about this, but it needs
> to be discussed in the community IMHO.

+1.

Keith