Subject: Re: Retrieving large DNS objects

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 23 Jan 2005 16:36:20 -0000

>You retrieve the authoritative nameservers and in turn call these
>using TCP.  That is, you don't put any major load on the
>infrastructure at large only on the server you have a contract with
>or run on your own.  Is that a viable scheme?

Seems pointless to me.  If you know you're going to find a server
using traditional UDP DNS, open a TCP session, give it a key, and it
gives you back a blob of XML, we already have a widely deployed scheme
called http to do that.  It's got caches, alleged session security,
content negotiation, all the trendy bells and whistles.

What would be the advantage of shoehorning the XML into DNS?

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John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711
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From: Edward Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 12:13:12 -0500

At 10:17 +0100 1/23/05, Anders Rundgren wrote:

>Does this (fat-object) paradigm fit DNS?

No.

It's hard to quantify in what way this proposal is wrong.

Applications have needs to search through and for data that is 
complex, dynamic, and large.  The DNS does not provide this and it 
shouldn't.

"Closed communities" and "open communities" are very different and 
have different needs.  The "science" differs between closed and open 
communities.  But there is a way to melt the two together.  The basic 
strategy is to create "lowest common denominator" (LCD) services for 
the open community and let the closed communities build upon that.

A community may be a company or it may be an application. 
Communities need not be topologically related.  This drives the need 
for a LCD open community tools.  This is why there is resistance to 
make the DNS too feature-rich.

>2
>Another possibility could be:
>You retrieve the authoritative nameservers and in turn call
>these using TCP.  That is, you don't put any major load on
>the infrastructure at large only on the server you have a
>contract with or run on your own.  Is that a viable scheme?

No.

There's a reason why UDP is the workhorse transport.  And it would be 
unwise to design the protocol that treats name servers differently. 
(I.e., the DNS is not aware of "contracts.")

>BTW, I have "ordered" an XML RR from IANA.  Putting the
>famous process to test.... :-)

Hope you followed the process documented in RFC 2929 and RFC 2434.
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Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

"A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man." - Jebediah Springfield