Subject: [weirds] Richard Barnes' No Objection on draft-ietf-weirds-bootstrap-10: (with COMMENT)

From: "Richard Barnes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 23:56:34 -0700

Richard Barnes has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-weirds-bootstrap-10: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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I'm a little unclear as to why this document is necessary.  It seems like
given the use of 30X redirects in -using-http, you could just start with
an IANA root server and redirect your way down the tree.  It may appear
that this bootstrap mechanism saves queries to the root, but you could
achieve the same effect or better using 301 redirects with appropriate
caching.

The use of JSON in this syntax is slightly disappointing.  Generally,
using JSON arrays to contain items of different types is not a great
idea.  It seems like the "services" entries should actually be objects,
with entries indicating the semantics of the inner arrays, e.g.:

OLD: [ ["1.0.0.0/8", "192.0.0.0/8"], ["https://rir1.example.com/myrdap/"]
]
NEW: { "resources": ["1.0.0.0/8", "192.0.0.0/8"], "urls":
["https://rir1.example.com/myrdap/"] }

This should not be hard to describe in the notation of Section 10.2, and
it only uses a few more bytes on the wire.

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From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Oct 2014 21:34:34 -0000

>achieve the same effect or better using 301 redirects with appropriate

We considered that, but rejected it because clients were unlikely to
do appropriate caching and the load on IANA would be excessive.  If
you do a lookup for foo.com and remember where it went, how does your
client know how to rewrite the different URL that looks up bar.com?
That foo.co.uk and bar.org.uk go to the same place, but baz.ac.uk does
not?  It's a swamp.

The plan is that people will slurp down the whole boostrap file at
some tolerable rate, like once a week.  IANA has told us that they
believe they can handle the load.  If someone wants to use the
bootstrap info to create their own universal redirect site (no doubt
to sell the traffic info to domain speculators) they can always do so.

FYI, the overall traffic for WHOIS lookups is enormous.  The last time
I looked at the registry reports, the volume of WHOIS traffic for .com
and .net was roughly the same as the volume of DNS lookup traffic.

R's,
John