Subject: Re: Fwd: Summary of the LLMNR Last Call

From: Edward Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 11:26:47 -0400

Speaking as a working group participant and ...

At 8:19 -0400 9/19/05, Margaret Wasserman wrote:

...taking Margaret's message out of order...

>>I am planning to send the document back to the WG for resolution of these
>>issues and would issue another IETF LC if/when the WG believes that they have
>>a document that will address these issues and reach IETF consensus.

Will this be fruitful?  I am directing the question to other WG participants.
(To Bernard - this is in no way to slight your work or your efforts. 
I am asking to judge whether I want to tune into the discussion on 
this.)

No insult is intended towards Bernard's efforts, but has there been 
significant interest by others (i.e., non-Bernard) in the WG?  I am 
asking because until now I have ignored the issue completely as I 
have no real driving interest in this topic.  But if the WG is being 
asked to take on what would be major work to solve the problems, I'll 
start to take notice.

If the goal of the IETF is interoperability, it seems unwise to 
standardize one approach to a problem when there is a incompatible 
approach in use.  I don't want to make this about Microsoft vs. Apple 
(I am saying that openly because it seems to be a smoldering concern 
in the LC comments), but rather the granting of the title of 
"standard" when there is clearly a choice of approaches.

LLMNR vs. mDNS isn't an isolated case of this, but it's the one case 
being put before the WG.

It seems to me that concerns 1 and 3 could be erased by removing 
LLMNR from standards track and publishing it as informational or even 
experimental.  Security concerns I understand and would become a work 
item, although my senses are that "security concerns" can become a 
work item that fills all space and time allotted for it.

I'm curious if the WG wants to take this back.  It's (I mean the 
problem, not the proposed solution) lingered so long, is there energy 
to solve the concerns raise in the last call?  Is there any, *any*, 
chance we can merge LLMNR and mDNS?  If not, I really don't think 
it'll be worth an interoperable standardization effort.

>>(1) Concerns that publication of this protocol will be confusing or actively
>>harmful given the existing wide deployment of Apple's mDNS protocol.

>>(2) Security concerns have been raised about the fact that applications on
>>hosts that implement LLMNR will not be able to tell if a response has come
>>from the DNS or from a local lookup.

>>(3) Separate, but perhaps underlying both of the previous issues, there seems
>>be a fundamental disagreement about what technical approach we 
>>should take to >>link-local name lookup.

>>CONCLUSION 1:  There are at least two blocking technical issues with the
>>LLMNR specification (raised in items #1 and #2 above)...

>>CONCLUSION 2: The IETF community does not currently have consensus to
>>standardize a local name resolution mechanism...

-- 
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Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

If you knew what I was thinking, you'd understand what I was saying.

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From: Paul Vixie <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 17:12:59 +0000

# It seems to me that concerns 1 and 3 could be erased by removing LLMNR from
# standards track and publishing it as informational or even experimental.

that's what happened to the SRV RR, and it hasn't hurt apple's or microsoft's
business at all to have the dreaded "experimental" tag on that RFC.

# I'm curious if the WG wants to take this back.  It's (I mean the problem,
# not the proposed solution) lingered so long, is there energy to solve the
# concerns raise in the last call?  Is there any, *any*, chance we can merge
# LLMNR and mDNS?  If not, I really don't think it'll be worth an
# interoperable standardization effort.

while i agree with this in general, i have three specific concerns.

1. the right way to do multicast DNS is draft-manning-opcode-discover-01,
   and while apple and microsoft both call their approaches "multicast dns"
   they are really "overloading dns to carry service discovery in multicast".

2. any attempt to merge mdns and llmnr MUST be backward compatible with mdns,
   since apple has created an important new economy of mdns services/devices
   and ietf should only ignore this economy if mdns is the provably wrong
   approach, rather than merely suboptimal in some way (that i'm unaware of).

3. if this is really about PnP, i sure wish that everybody would just say so
   and re-frame the debate in PnP terms and stop treating it as a dns issue
   that's somehow relevant to the skills of the core namedroppers community.