Re: The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse (was Re: Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?)

["Jay R. Ashworth" <jra () baylink com>]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 01:06:15AM +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
> >  To many alt-roots?  Or too many alt-TLD's?
>
>       Too many of the former is likely to lead to having too many of 
> the latter.  Both are bad.

I don't know that I agree with either of those assertions, absent
collision problems, personally, but this subthread officially makes
this a religious argument; comments here off-list.

> > >    The problem is that they are pretty much guaranteed to get at
> > >  cross-purposes.
> >
> >  Well, there have been alt-root zones available for, what 6 or 7 years
> >  now?  And how many collisions have there actually been in practice?  2?
> >  3?
>
>       We have not yet hit the knee of the curve.

Perhaps.  I think those people are *much* more concerned about this
than I think you think they are.

> > >    I don't think that's really practical.  I'm sorry, I just don't
> > >  trust them to write a resolver that's going to get included in libc
> > >  (or wherever), and for which the world is going to be dependant.
> >
> >  Well, I meant "at your customer recursive resolver servers", since the
> >  topic at hand was "what do IAP's do to support their retail customers",
> >  but...
>
>       I don't trust them to write code that will be used in 
> mission-critical situations or places, regardless of where that is.

Wasn't sure which them you meant here...

>       It's not that they don't have the best intentions -- I'm sure 
> that at least some of them do.  It's that they don't have the 
> necessary experience.
>
>       The people I would trust to have enough of the right experience 
> to make something like this work (if that's possible at all) are the 
> same people who wrote Nominum's ANS and CNS.  However, I suspect that 
> they would probably be about the last people in the world who would 
> be interested in trying to make something like this work.

And then I figured it out.

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.

> > >  People will always be able to access data by pure IP address, or
> > >  choosing to use the real root servers.  Push come to shove, and the
> > >  real root servers could be proxied through other systems via other
> > >  methods.
> >
> >  "Real" is *such* a metaphysical term here, isn't it?  :-)
>
>       Heh.  Shall we use the term IRS?  As in Incumbent Root Servers?

I don't have a problem with that one, the amusing connotations
notwithstanding.  Incumbent isn't a value judgement, it's merely
descriptive.

> > >    The reverse problem is more difficult to deal with -- that of
> > >  people wanting to access Chinese (or whatever) sites that can only be
> > >  found in the Chinese-owned alternative root.
> >
> >  Stipulated.  But whose problem *is* that?
>
> The users will make it our problem, if we don't get this sorted out soon.

Yup, it is.

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.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra () baylink com
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