Subject: Protocol Action: A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV) to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 1999 13:11:20 -0500

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'A DNS RR for specifying the
location of services (DNS SRV)' <draft-ietf-dnsind-rfc2052bis-04.txt>
as a Proposed Standard.  This document is the product of the DNS IXFR,
Notification, and Dynamic Update Working Group.  The IESG contact
persons are Jeffrey Burgan and Thomas Narten.

Technical Summary
 
This document describes DNS SRV RRs, which specify the location of
server(s) for a specific protocol and domain in general way.
Currently, one must typically know the exact address (i.e., IP address
plus port number) of a server to contact it.  This has led to, for
example, ftp.whatever.com aliases [RFC 2219], the SMTP-specific MX RR,
and using MAC-level broadcasts to locate servers.

The SRV RR allows administrators to associate one or more servers with
a domain name, move services from host to host with little fuss, and
designate some hosts as primary servers and others as
backups. Services are named using high-level names like "ftp", "nntp",
etc.

Working Group Summary

There was consensus in the WG for moving this document from
Experimental to Standards Track.

Protocol Quality

This document updates and replaces RFC 2052, an experimental
protocol. It has been implemented by several vendors and has been
shown to be useful in deployments.

This protocol has been reviewed for the IESG by Thomas Narten.

Note to RFC Editor:

The authors have agreed to add the following paragraph to the end of the
section "Introductory Example":

    Note: LDAP is chosen as an example for illustrative purposes only,
    and the LDAP examples used in this document should not be
    considered a definitive statement on the recommended way for LDAP
    to use SRV records. As described in the earlier applicability
    section, consult the appropriate LDAP documents for the
    recommended procedure.