more on Beyond the DNS

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Steven Champeon <schampeo () hesketh com>
Date: October 2, 2005 9:44:33 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: Tobin Maginnis <ptm () pix cs olemiss edu>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Beyond the DNS


on Sun, Oct 02, 2005 at 06:24:03AM -0400, David Farber wrote:

> From: Tobin Maginnis <ptm () pix cs olemiss edu>
> Date: October 1, 2005 10:25:56 PM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Re: [IP] Beyond the DNS
>
>
> Hi Dave,       [For IP if you wish...]
>
> I have enjoyed the fascinating discussion on DNS, but there seems to
> be several small points that were either implied or assumed which I
> think could be developed more fully.
>
> One point is the nature of DNS as a parallel entity to networking. In
> a way, it's similar to how the lymphatic system relates to the
> circulatory system. The lymphatic system helps identify infectious
> agents, but it's the circulatory system that does the real work in
> fighting pathology.
>
> As indicated in an earlier discussion, Domain Name Service (DNS) is
> implemented with nothing more than a series of hierarchical files
> that lead to a name (URL prefix) and IP address pair. The actual data
> transfer in the Internet (including DNS lookup) is carried out
> through TCP/DGP and IP exchanges.

There's a lot more to DNS than "what IP does this name have?" For
instance, it also answers questions like "who do I ask about this
domain?" or "where do I send email to this address?" or "with what key
do I encrypt subsequent traffic" or "is this email sender authentic".
DNS is about a lot more than you seem to give it credit for. It's sad
to see such a powerful system referred to a a "URL prefix", which
apparently confuses the Web for the entire Internet, common among those
who don't know anything about the Internet but a dangerous mistake for
anyone trying to understand the furor over Internet governance.


> A second point is that internet access is really a search problem as
> opposed to a name identification problem. Said another way, Google
> would probably be just as effective search engine as it is today if
> it simply searched the IP address space (without using URLs) on port
> 80 and noted all the resulting web page information.

This ignores the widespread use of name-based virtual hosting, which
makes such IP-based queries/indexing nearly useless. We host several
dozen sites on our servers (using most of a /27) but you'd never know
it from connecting to the IP alone, as they're almost all configured
to only answer to the name.

Steve

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