On 1/18/2011 5:16 PM, David Nicol wrote:
The inclusion of such a section could elevate the document from the
specific to the general, and set an example as a model for a best
practice in the composition of best practices documents: before
getting down and dirty with details confusing to the newcomer, spend a
paragraph answering the "why?" behind the deer-in-the-headlights
glaze.
Currently all we have in this realm is "Due to the rising amount of
spam and other forms of network abuse on the Internet, many community
members and companies began to create, publish and maintain DNS-based
reputation systems (DNS-Based Lists) of IP addresses or domain names
and make reputation suggestions or assertions about email sourced from
these IP addresses or domain names."
I would like to see that paragraph expanded to explain what it is
about reputation data that makes DNS a good technology for
distributing it, and what it is about DNS that makes it a good
technology for distributing reputation data, or other data (aside
from, of course, name to number mappings and their reverse) that
makes, or might make sense, to distribute by DNS.
In conclusion, start reading a biography of Mark Twain first thing in
the morning and you'll be loquacious all day.
Heh.
I can see the point. A subsection of the introduction entitled "But why
DNS?", and listing out your points plus a few more (like "DNS already
exists and is ubiquitous", "it distributes in a global manner", "like
wow, it works well"). A bit of a paeon to Vixie's serendipitous insight
at a time when few would have thought of it.
But, I'm not sure that the BCP is exactly the place for that much detail
of the historical justification of _why_ we do it this way. Especially
one that could start up a religious war with the purists who've already
screamed "but it doesn't return an IP address of a host!" even when it
wasn't rubbed in their faces.
I dunno. Other opinions?
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