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Re: Last Call: <draft-jabley-dnsext-eui48-eui64-rrtypes-03.txt> (Resource Records for EUI-48 and EUI-64 Addresses in the DNS) to Proposed Standard

2013-05-22 21:05:19
From: Keith Moore <moore(_at_)network-heretics(_dot_)com>

On 05/21/2013 10:04 AM, Joe Abley wrote:

With respect, *my* question as the author of this document is
simply whether the specification provided is unambiguous and
sufficient. It was my understanding that this was the question
before the community in this last call.

The criteria for Proposed Standard are quite a bit higher than that.   
See RFC 2026 section 4.1.1.

Coming into this from the outside, the issues are interesting.

I originally thought RRTYPEs are scarce, since all the ones I was
aware of are less than 256.  But it turns out that RRTYPEs are 16 bit
integers, and we've only consumed about 110 of them in ~25 years; we
have about 15,000 years' supply of them.  So they can be handed out
rather generously.

There actually is a standard for allocating RRTYPEs, which is RFC 6195
(section 3.1).  RRTYPEs are to be handed out rather freely.

OTOH, the standards for Proposed Standard are stricter.

In regard to the question of whether to use one RRTYPE or two, it
seems that the question is whether, in practice, it is common to want
to query for both EUI-48 and EUI-64 for the same domain name at the
same time.

In regard to *how* to subtype a single RRTYPE, the resource records
themselves contain a "DATA length" field (RDLENGTH, see RFC 1035
section 3.2.1), so if we used only one RRTYPE, the RDLENGTH field
would differentiate EUI-48 from EUI-64.

There are 768 RFCs that have INFORMATIONAL status and contain the word
"MUST" -- and that is over 10% of the total number of RFCs published
to date.  So it looks like RFC 2119 terminology is commonly used in
informational RFCs.  Personally, it seems like a good idea.  If you
want to notify the world of a privately-developed protocol, you want
to be able to say MUST and SHOULD; labeling it as INFORMATIONAL makes
clear that the IETF hasn't endorsed the protocol.

Dale

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