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Re: draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

2000-04-26 18:30:04
even the DNS names for major services may not be well maintained.
at one time I did a survey of the reasons for mail bounces
for one of my larger mailing lists. 

You appear to be saying that because historically people screwed up
configuring their DNS that it is impossible to rely on the DNS for critical
infrastructure.  This seems wrong to me.

I wouldn't say 'impossible'.  My point is that it is more difficult
to get this to work well than it might seem at first glance.

one reason I cited the DNS-related problems in email is that many 
people would consider email a critical service, and also one that
is employed on a daily basis by a large portion of one's network users.
so if people won't do what's necessary to make their email work, will 
they take the necessary steps to make other less critical services work?

If a properly configured DNS was a fundamental requirement of a working
network connection as is assumed by something like 8+8, I think it fairly
certain that any misconfigurations would be fixed as quickly as (say) a BGP
misconfiguration.

it depends ... on the size of the user population affected by a DNS
record (probably much smaller than the typical BGP misconfiguration,
and therefore less important) and also on where the errors are detected 
(email errors are usually detected by the sender of a message, since
that's who gets the bounced message.  but the party who has responsibility 
for fixing the error is usually not on the sender's end of things)

and note that even if you fix the reliability problems associated
with using DNS to do mapping from global endpoint IDs to local
routing information, you still have the performance problems to
deal with.

Keith