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

2000-04-27 14:10:02
    > From: Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>

    >> 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.

    > 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. ... 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.

Are you making the assumption that we can grow the network in size (let's not
even get into functionality) *without* adding extra architecture/mechanism?

In other words, is your problem with DNS as currently designed/implemented/
maintained - or is it more (as I seem to recall from previous messages from
you) with the general notion that more complex things are fundamentally bad
(since any extra mechanism is also a place for something to go wrong, or a
place to incur overhead)?

If so, I'd say that's false economy - to paraphrase Lincoln on leg length, a
network of a certain size and functionality neeeds a certain amount of
complexity, and if you fail to architect it in (i.e. cleanly), it will get
added around the edges in all sorts of ugly warts (i.e. the kind the Internet
stack is currently infested with).

        Noel