Subject: Re: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-dnsop-dontpublish-unreachable-00.txt

From: Simon Josefsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2001 18:37:13 +0200

Daniel Senie <[email-masked]> writes:

> I just read this new I-D, and am not sure it's a "good thing." My
> concern centers around the draft's assumption that there are two types
> of environments, public and private, and that it is easy to tell the
> difference. I worry that with the increased use of policy routing,
> IPSec and such, we might well find cases where the degree of
> "publicness" or "privateness" of information is highly dependent on
> where a particular station is on the Internet, and what its
> authorizations are.
> 
> I could imagine, for example, a user authorized to use a mail
> exchanger which is within the protected realm of a company (yet has a
> public address which responds only if the remote requests are using
> IPSec). Should that user be able to find the address of that machine?

As a data point for this discussion, consider "mirror.aarnet.edu.au"
-- it is a large FTP mirror site, available within Australia only.
Should the IP address of the host be published in DNS or not?  Is it a
"public" or "private" host?  (Luckily, the MX's are available outside
of Australia though.)

Maybe one way forward for the draft would be to only "forbid"
officially reserved addresses such as 127/8 or 10/8.  But this seems
to severely limit (my perceived) goal of the draft, so it might not be
what you want.  I also doubt that anyone who used those addresses in
DNS would care about a BCP saying that they shouldn't.