Happy Birthday, Dear DNS

Shloka writes with a snippet from Wired News: "Twenty years ago Monday, two computer scientists at the University of Southern California created a key component essential to the modern Internet. Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris ran the first successful test of the automated domain name system, or DNS..."

Comments

Using the Internet before DNS

[Animats]

I remember the old days, when you had to download the HOSTS.TXT file from SRI-NIC, using anonymous FTP. Adding a host required talking to people at SRI. Name propagation took months, because many sites didn't update their HOSTS.TXT site frequently. (Parts of the MILNET still work that way, for security reasons.)

ARPANET IMP addresses were orignally 8 bits. They were expanded from 8 to 16 bits in the late 1970s, but some sites didn't upgrade their software and only talked to host numbers below 256. So having a low host number (1..255) meant something.

I got the fifth Class B IP block (128.5.xxx.xxx) for Ford, and that was being nice - we probably could have gotten a class A. BBN had four class A blocks back then.

And there was no spam. Not ever.

Re:Using the Internet before DNS

[stanwirth]

Well I used to update our /etc/hosts (in Unix, we don't use the suffix -- you must have been on one of them VMS machines, calling it HOSTS.TXT!) every friday without fail-- but then, campus networking would do the (long, slow) download from sri.nic.arpa for the benefit for the rest of the sysadmins, plus you could get just a patch and apply the diffs -- so it wasn't that big a deal to get it over the network, no hours of babysitting an FTP link back to the mothership SRI. Sort of like the way DNS actually works now -- like a phone tree.

I figured they got the idea of how to set up the DNS distributed hierarchical database bits by studying the pattern of how people actually distributed their hosts files -- and wouldn't it be nice if they'd only have to distribute the changes: just like sending out weekly patches. Plus ca change, plus ca change pas.

When we got ahold of the first alpha and beta versions of BIND in the mid-80's, downloading the hosts table was still preferable because there were just too many bugs in BIND at that stage. It's kind of annoying that so little stuff is set up to fall back to the hosts tables properly anymore.

it's called LDAP

[axxackall]

I know, LDAP is designed to host and distribute personal user acount info, while you want LDAP for everyone, not only computer users. But the problem is that outside of computer industry itself computer information services are either expensive or useless.

Twenty years is not really a long time interval to change our social life revolutionary. Although, it was in last 20 years that Internet have become a part of our life. Or have it?

Most of information services in Internet are about other Internet informational services or about Internet technologies. No wonder: when it is growing on shoulders of Internet enthusiasts they publish what they know. And the best they know is Internet itself.

The picture was going to change with B2C, but the boom has collapsed saddenly, and then all investors have frozen their money waiting when Mr. President will finally all his wars he's planned. I guess once he's doneand investors are back then B2C will take it's second chance and then we'll finally see more and more infomration services about resources directly not related to internet nor to computer industry.

Another factor is that ma-bells in their core services are far from being "internetized". They might still afraid Internet after ATT was hacked famously in eary 1980s. I worked in ATT. I remember that Internet is prohibitted for all workstations (exception: http proxy for some of them). It's just an illustration of paranoid anti-internet environment there.

Another factor is the modern anti-spam trend - people afraid spam and telemarketing and they don't want to publish their personal info like phone numbers and email addresses. I guess until there will be a law (international, as domestic laws do not protect such international thing as Internet) protecting from spam and from telemarketing, until then people will not let their info being published.

Conclusion: let Mr. Bush finish his wars and investors to re-animate B2C, let ma-bells leave their paranoid fears of Internet, let the law protect people from the spam - and you'll be able to use LDAP to find you friends even if they are not connected to Internet.

DNS is not a locator service

[IGnatius T Foobar]

DNS is not a locator service, but unfortunately people treat it as if it were one. They think "ok, I want to find the web site for XYZ Corporation, so all I have to do is just prepend WWW to the name and append COM and it'll be there." This line of thinking is what has created all of the fighting that goes on over domain names -- the reason we seem to treat domain names as if they were real estate. A true locator service would have a number of fields you could fill out to tell it what you're looking for, and it would find it for you. Perhaps it would simply find the domain name, which in turn would find the IP address.

It's not going to happen now, though. At least not using the IETF standards process. Back when DNS was invented, people knew how to participate -- the result is things like DNS, and SMTP, where everyone talks to everyone else. Now that the corporateheads have taken over, everything gets invented in lawyerspace, where standards take a back seat to money (or at least some corporate idiot's dream of making lots of money by owning a choke point) and you have horrid nonstandard systems that don't talk to each other (like the various independent instant messaging systems).

Oh well.