Subject: Protocol Action: 'Special-Use Domain Names' to Proposed Standard (draft-cheshire-dnsext-special-names-02.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 10:35:44 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Special-Use Domain Names'
  (draft-cheshire-dnsext-special-names-02.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an
IETF Working Group.

The IESG contact person is Ralph Droms.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cheshire-dnsext-special-names/

     Technical Summary 

   Certain individual IP addresses and IP address ranges are treated
   specially by network implementations, and consequently are not
   suitable for use as unicast addresses. For example, IPv4 addresses
   224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 are multicast addresses [RFC2606],
   with 224.0.0.1 being the "all hosts" multicast address [RFC1112]
   [RFC5771]. Another example is 127.0.0.1, the IPv4 "local host"
   address [RFC5735].

   Analogous to Special-Use IPv4 Addresses [RFC5735], DNS has its own
   concept of reserved names, such as "example.com", "example.net",
   and "example.org", or any name falling under the top level
   pseudo-domain "invalid" [RFC2606]. However, "Reserved Top Level DNS
   Names" [RFC2606] does not state whether implementations are
   expected to treat such names differently, and if so, in what way.

   This document describes what it means to say that a DNS name is
   reserved for special use, when reserving such a name is appropriate,
   and the procedure for doing so.

     Working Group Summary 

N/A.  This document is being processed as an AD-sponsored individual
submission.  The authors consider the document ready for publication.

     Document Quality 

The document is short and clearly defines a new IANA registry for DNS
special-use names.

Personnel

   This document is being processed as an AD-sponsored individual
   submission.  Ralph Drosm <[email-masked]> is the
   responsible area director.