North American Network Operators Group

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Why replicate the DNS?

  • From: Michael.Dillon
  • Date: Tue Mar 04 07:47:54 2003

>> How would you feel about ARIN being the root of a registry hierarchy 
that 
>> works similar to the DNS? In that case, ARIN would not necessarily hold 

>> the route information, they would just be at the top of the search 
>> hierarchy just like the root name servers are at the top of the DNS 
>> hierarchy. ARIN would authoritatively identify the leaseholder of an 
>> address block and give you a pointer to that leaseholder's LDAP server 
>> where you could query for whatever info they have available. This could 

>> include route registry info.

> I don't know that the other RIRs would be willing to promote ARIN
> to the position once held by the IANA as the arbitor of all IP
> address space.  That said, why replicate the DNS?

Once this improved IP address registry catches on, then I would expect the 
root to move up to IANA but for now, IANA has delegated large chunks of 
address space to ARIN to administer.

In any case, I don't want to replicate the DNS. It works just fine as it 
is and I want to leave it alone. I especially don't want to expand the 
role of the DNS by adding features to it. LDAP is a more general purpose 
directory protocol. It's expandable and there are lots of tools available 
to work with it. If you want to integrate your directory to the DNS you 
simply use your domain name as base of your hierarchy. But there is no 
reason why we couldn't integrate it to the IP address allocation hierarchy 
as well. The easiest way to start this is to come up with a standard LDAP 
schema to replace rwhois and move forward from there.

I'm not suggesting that we all start running LDAP servers instead of DNS, 
but some people may find it useful to integrate the two even tighter using 
something like ldapdns http://www.nimh.org/code/ldapdns/ or ldap2dns 
http://ldap2dns.tiscover.com/

--Michael Dillon