Subject: [Bundled-domain-names] DNS resolution for bundled names

From: "Jiankang Yao" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2016 10:14:24 +0800

Dear all,

     Thanks for being interested in the bunding name resolution issue.

The initial aim of this list discussion is for 

"
CNAME maps itself to another name. DNAME maps its descendants to another domain name.
If the name wants to map
itself and its descendants to another domain name, what should we do?
We need to design some solution to this problem. "

We hope to gather some interests for this issue to see whether we can do some standardlization work for it  in  IETF.
Out initial plan is to have a bar bof in Berlin IETF meeting. 

Some background information is listed bellow.

Any comments are welcome.

thanks a lot.
Jiankang Yao

____________________________________________
The following is the description for this issue.
--------------------------------------------

Use Case 1: Bundled domain names
Bundled domain names are those who share the same TLD but whose
second level labels are variants, or those who has identical second
level labels for which certain parameters are shared in the different
TLDs. For example, public Interest Registry, request to implement
technical bundling of second level domains for .NGO and .ONG. So we
have two kinds of bundled domain names. First one is in the form of
"V-label.TLD" in which the second level labels (V-label) are varants
sharing the same TLD; Second one is in the form of "LABEL.V-tld" in
which the second level labels(LABEL) are same with the different TLDs
(V-tld). Bundled domain names usually need to map itself and its descendants to another.
for examples:
example.com == example.net same label ending with different TLDs
color.com == colour.com different labels ending with the same TLD

Use Case 2: any two domain names
One company registers 2 domain names, A and B.      A needs to 
map itself and its descendants to B in order to have a easy manangement.
for examples:
example1.com == example2.net

Use Case 3: a company register the same label in different TLDs.
With the emergence growth of gTLDs, it is very common to register one label under many TLDs for the same purpose. but the comany may just use  one label under one TLD as the primary domain name, others as the  less important one. The company may want to have all these domain names share the similar/same DNS resolution results.
So the DNS administrator hopes to have some convinient method to configure these domain names in DNS.

Many years ago, we try to solve the similar problem in DNSEXT WG.
That problem includes the variant issues. But the variant issues are too complex.
So this time, we try to exclude the variant issues, and limit the problem to 
"the name maps itself and its descendants to another name" and get the solution.

The related drafts:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yao-dnsext-identical-resolution-00 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yao-dnsext-bname-05
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sury-dnsext-cname-dname-00 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barton-clone-dns-labels-fun-profit-00 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vixie-dnsext-dnsshadow-00 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jiankang Yao

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From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 Apr 2016 03:58:26 -0000

>Out initial plan is to have a bar bof in Berlin IETF meeting.

Thanks for taking this on.  It seems to me that the different bundling
scenarios can be addressed in different ways, and we might want to deal
with the easy ones first.

The easiest is probably parallel TLDs like .ONG/.NGO.  There's already
DNAMEs at the top level for the traditional and simplified versions of
Taiwan, and as far as I can tell, the DNS aspects work pretty well.
(As opposed to whether mail, web, and other servers do what you'd want
when the DNAME sends traffic their way.)

The .CAT domain bundles 2LD names, in their case an accented version
and ASCII version of the name.  They use a DNAME for the accented
version that points at the unaccented version, which works really
badly.  Partly that's because the DNAME doesn't redirect itself,
partly I've found from spot checking that even the 3LD names that the
DNAME does redirect rarely work in practice, with almost none of web
servers I checked handling them.

So one part of the work could be looking at BNAME or something like it
that could make parallel 2LD names work better, both within the same
TLD and within arbitrary places in the tree.

A separate issue is how one might arrange to have servers for web,
mail, and so forth automatically configure themselves to do something
reasonable when a BNAME or DNAME points at them.  Roughly speaking, when
they get a request for a domain they don't think they handle, they could
do a DNS lookup on the name and if there's a BNAME or DNAME redirect,
treat it as equivalent as the redirect target.  I realize that in some
contexts this has all sorts of security issues but I think it'd be
possible to carve out a useful subset that's not too dangerous and
still useful.

R's,
John