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Re: Devilish: Forget about DNS

2004-02-09 10:30:00

On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 06:11:57PM +0100, Patrik Fältström wrote:
On 2004-02-09, at 17.50, Hadmut Danisch wrote:

DNS is difficult to extend for new record types, which makes
it expensive to introduce a new record type like RMX RR.

I don't agree with this.

I think we should start the discussion right here. What do you base 
this information on?


I proposed to introduce a new RR with the first version of the 
RMX draft in December 2002. Since then I'm drowning in mails like
"How can you dare...", "We don't want...", "Too many old DNS 
servers, which can't be replaced...", "Too expensive...", "Too
much overhead...", "Will take 10-20 years...", "We don't support
this...", "Proprietary DNS server, can't be extended...", "Needs to
replace billions of DNS client softare..." and much, much more of
that. 

The other problem is that many, many people complained that they
would need to change the firewall or even network structure because
records would grow beyond 512 bytes and require TCP queries. 
As if many of today's DNS records wouldn't be longer than 512 bytes
anyway. 

But if we accept to query DNS records with TCP, why, after all, should 
we bother to fetch all entries and to stitch information together from 
differen TXT and A records or a new record type? HTTP is just perfect
for fetching a record of any data type and any length. And it exists. 
No need to replace or update HTTP servers.

All we need is to find the HTTP server which is competent to give the 
answer. Finding the HTTP server is a DNS task, that's what DNS is 
designed to do.

And a HTTP query is imho significantly better than trying to fetch 
several records throuth DNS/TCP and trying to stitch them together
(and no way to trigger the DNS server to refetch missing records).



Hadmut




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