Thus spake "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com>
On 19-sep-2007, at 17:48, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
All of those things are broken, of course. That doesn't change the fact
they exist and folks in the operational community will not be impressed
with a "solution" that ignores those problems.
Sometimes ignoring a problem really does make it go away.
Install a workaround, on the other hand, and the brokenness
remains non-obvious so it persists.
If often persists whether it remains non-obvious or not. I can't count how
many hotels I've visited where I have to disable v6 on my laptop for v4 DNS
to work because their boxes break horribly when confronted with an AAAA
lookup. This has been going on for _years_ and the operators and vendors
obviously don't care even though the problem is blatantly obvious.
I'm not advocating going around and breaking implementations
that don't fully conform with specs on purpose, but if doing the
right thing means that out-of-spec implementations see some
problems, I can usually live with that.
Whether I can live with that in a particular case depends on what percentage
of the userbase will see "some problems" if that brokenness is exposed.
For instace, we accomodate multi-faced DNS because most "major" web sites
would become inaccessible if it weren't. If you are proposing a new
protocol that would not accomodate it, forcing users to choose between that
protocol and being able to access Google, Yahoo, CNN, MySpace, etc., it's
obvious which the masses will choose.
S
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
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