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Re: Review of: draft-ietf-v6ops-v6-aaaa-whitelisting-implications-03

2011-05-16 17:14:23

On 2011-05-11, at 20:25, Joe Touch wrote:

FWIW, the Los Angeles County banned the terms in 2003 when used for various 
purposes - including technology, preferring "primary" and "secondary", in 
specific. The terms don't even appear in the ATA spec after version 1.

I believe that story may be apocryphal. e.g. 
<http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/> (one of the few 
references I could find in a hurry that actually quote anybody from the county):

"I do understand that this term has been an industry standard for years and 
years and this is nothing more than a plea to vendors to see what they can 
do," [Sandoval] said. "It appears that some folks have taken this a little 
too literally."

Sandoval said that he had already rejected a suggestion that the county stop 
buying all equipment carrying the "master" and "slave" labels and had no 
intention of enforcing a ban on such terms with suppliers.

According to that article, Joe Sandoval was the division manager of purchasing 
and contract services at the time. Not that this is particularly on-topic for 
anything (and I'm no expert, and am very happy to concede that my amateur 
sleuthing has led me down the garden path).

For what it's worth, there is no shortage of examples of the use of "master" 
and "slave" in the DNS in Los Angeles county. In that particular context 
"primary" and "secondary" are particularly poor choices of terminology (in my 
opinion), since from the point of view of a DNS requestor master/primary and 
slave/secondary servers are simply instances of authoritative servers and no 
preference or priority ought to be inferred (masters are not prioritised above 
slaves or even identifiable as such; master/slave denotes the control plane 
distribution of zone data only).


Joe
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