Re: [weirds] I-D Action: draft-blanchet-weirds-bootstrap-ianaregistries-00.txt

[Byron Ellacott <[e-mail]>]

Hi John,

On 24/06/13 3:05 PM, "John R. Levine" <[e-mail]> wrote:

>> If bootstrapping via DNS is sufficient for the reverse DNS domain
>> queries, is query load the main reason it isn't also sufficient for IP
>> network queries?
>
>Numbers are different.  For IPv4 you could fake it by using the top octet
>of the address, but for IPv6 and ASNs the allocation structure is
>extremely irregular and I don't see any way to represent it in the DNS
>with reasonable performance.

Right, I agree, but I'm not suggesting that bootstrap should start by
trying to find the best server directly by picking some part of the
address and looking that up in the DNS.  I am suggesting that if
arpa.domain.rdap.arpa is capable of redirecting a querying client to the
correct server for 2.0.192.in-addr.arpa, then something.rdap.arpa is
capable of redirecting a querying client to the correct server for
192.0.2/24.

>It's perfectly possible to represent the allocation information in a
>compact and efficiently searchable form (it is, after all, on three pages
>at IANA), but not by using the formats that the DNS provides.  The number
>bootstrap data changes very rarely, like once a year or less, so it's OK
>for the update not to be automatic.  Hence the per-TLD DNS lookup for the
>regularly named but frequently updated and uncoordinated DNS registries,
>and the vague baked-in bootstrap hack for the irregularly named, but
>rarely updated and well coordinated RIRs.

And something.rdap.arpa could quite easily be a set of servers where a
client can select a good reasonable starting server from that set based on
an internal hints table, but where any of the set of servers will do the
appropriate redirection.

What I don't want to see is that the bootstrap process for numbers
involves fetching that table as the first step in the bootstrap, plus or
minus caching, because that sort of fetch-and-parse significantly
increases the complexity of doing a query for an IP network.  (And I don't
think you've suggested this.)

  Byron