nanog mailing list archives
Re: Statements against new.net?
From: "Brett Frankenberger" <rbf () rbfnet com>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 16:19:01 -0600 (CST)
On Tue, 13 March 2001, "Steven M. Bellovin" wrote:Put simply, deploying multiple public DNS roots would raise a very strong possibility that users of different ISPs who click on the same link on a web page could end up at different destinations, against the will of the web page designers.Its not really the "will of the web page designers." If this becomes popular, I suspect most web page designers will start using dotted-quad addresses inside their HTML URLs on their web pages. So clicking on a link on a web page will go to were the web page designer directs you. Except for NAT strangeness, IP Address are mostly globally unique.
Fine. Then we have a technical issue associated with "all the links break when a web server is moved to a different IP address because whoever was hosting it had to renumber", and it's companion "I can fix the links because there's no way to know what the new IP address is". Since the reason renumbering is a reality are technical -- or, are at least presented that way -- the need for a single DNS root remains technical. Dotted-quads aren't a viable technical solution on the Internet as it exists today, anyway, because there's too many servers that have one IP address and lots of virtual hosts.
The issue is really one of user expectations. Some class of users have developed the expectation if they type some words resembling what they are looking for in the "address" prompt of their web browser, they will get taken to someplace they want.
That is indeed a political issue, but it's separate from DNS. There is a technical need to map a name that is relatively constant to an IP address which is relatively transient. The requirement for DNS names to have some meaning to the user is political, and that could certainly be eliminated, but 2826 doesn't address that issue. It only addresses the need for "one true DNS". We could certainly (and probably should, although it's unlikely to happen) make DNS names non-meaningful and then have a higher level of search functionality to provide lookups based on meaningful names, and there could certainly be multiple such search providers. -- Brett
Current thread:
- Re: Statements against new.net?, (continued)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Havard Eidnes (Mar 13)
- RE: Statements against new.net? Mike Batchelor (Mar 13)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Havard Eidnes (Mar 14)
- RE: Statements against new.net? Mike Batchelor (Mar 14)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Shawn McMahon (Mar 13)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Patrick Greenwell (Mar 13)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Hank Nussbacher (Mar 14)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Rafi Sadowsky (Mar 14)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Valdis . Kletnieks (Mar 13)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Brett Frankenberger (Mar 13)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Vadim Antonov (Mar 13)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Scott Francis (Mar 13)
- Message not available
- Re: Statements against new.net? Geoff Huston (Mar 13)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Vadim Antonov (Mar 14)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Valdis . Kletnieks (Mar 13)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Scott Francis (Mar 13)
- Re: Statements against new.net? Havard Eidnes (Mar 13)