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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse (was Re:Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?)
At 7:37 PM -0400 2005-07-05, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: In theory, it should be trivial. In practice, I believe that it is quite non-trivial. I believe that we can look around and pretty easily find at least a few examples that demonstrate how difficult it is to get this right.Hmmm... again, absent TLD collisions, I don't see that writing a recursive-only server that can coalesce the TLD namespace from multiple roots ought to be *that* hard... but then I'm not Cricket, neither. The history of BIND alone is quite instructive, I believe. The fact that everyone and their brother seems to create authoritative-only servers as their 6th grade science project, but there are still relatively few caching-only servers, is another data point. I'm not sure, but I think we're at the stage where we might just be able to put the genie back in the bottle, if we act fast and we can get suitable alternative mechanisms in place through the existing official IETF/ICANN process.And my perception is that the cat is *out* of the bag, and fretting about how bad it would be were the cat to get out of the bag (which is my perception of most people's view of this issue) isn't especially productive; the solution is to figure out how to manage the problem. But if we don't get this fixed soon, I fear that we'll never be able to do that. At that point, we've got our private parts hanging out in the wind, and we're depending on the good nature of people not to come along and whack them with baseball bats, and we're depending on good fortune keeping harsh weather away that might result in lightning strikes. There's not much we can do to stop the alternate roots. They already exist, and at least two are currently in operation. However, I think we can look at what it is that they're offering in terms of i18n and see what we can do to address those issues from inside the system. IMO, i18n is the only potentially legitimate thing that alternate roots are capable of providing, and the only thing we need to worry about resolving within the system. Outside of i18n, I don't give a flying flip what the alternate roots do or what services they claim to offer. And that, I believe, is operationally relevant because the outcome will affect us all. If nothing else, code will have to be adapted to match whatever is specified as a result of the IETF/ICANN political process. And we'll all have to update our servers. -- Brad Knowles, <[email protected]> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
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