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Paul Mockapetris On The Future of DNS
penciling_in writes "In a CircleID article called Letting
DNS Loose, Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of DNS and Chief Scientist and Chairman of Nominum, gives a good indication of
what is to be expected in the upcoming years when it comes to data riding on
DNS: "RFID tags, UPC codes, International characters in email
addresses and host names, and a variety of other identifiers could all go into
DNS, and folks have occasionally proposed doing just that. It's really just a
question of figuring out how to use the DNS -- it's ready to carry arbitrary
identifiers." According to Paul, there are 40 or so data types to be added
to DNS: "In fact the whole ENUM scheme is built out of classical DNS
technology, and NAPTR is really just the latest data type to be added to the
DNS. NAPTR is also just an extension of SRV, which was an extension of MX, which
are DNS data types that Active Directory uses to start itself and the Internet
uses to route each piece of mail." Paul also clarifies the recent BBC story
previously discussed here
on Slashdot."
I'm surprised that mDNS wasn't mentioned in the context of the future of DNS. It is, after all, the technology behind Rendezvous, Apple's protocol for automatic service advertising and configuration on local LANs. mDNS is basically just normal DNS multicasted, with some conventions on how to represent services.
mDNS is already used for zero-configuration networking, sharing iTunes playlists, and finding other iChat users on a local LAN. Since it's based on DNS, its both simple and has mature implementations. And it's open source; Apple provides a working reference implementation for MacOS 9, MacOS X, Windows, and Posix (including Linux).
Internet explorer can also auto-add www. + .com if you press ctrl+enter while typing the url. .co.jp
.com, shift-enter adds .net, etc.
so google + ctrl/enter gives you what you want.
This also seems to depend on language settings - pressing ctrl+enter with regional settings set to "japan" will prepend www. and append
I think MYIE2 has different modifiers, ctrl+enter adds
but there is a way to implement mutillingual domain without set up a application to convert native languges to DNS normal charater as iDNS mechanism.
DNS is great in it's hierarchal nature- one can simply delagate domains to another server, which keeps what ever DNS is managing the root (like slashdot.org.) from getting overloaded with requests.
However, how is it going to work if we add Barcodes, RFIDs, etc to DNS? Are we going to create a RFID domain? RFIDs are unique numbers, AFAIK, which is more like an IP address, which is exactly what DNS is designed to avoid the usage of! Will i go buy tee.shirt.yellow.minnesota.walmart and have the register go look up the RFID and price information? That would seem backwards.
Also, we're going to need many more DNS servers if we are going to piggy back those sorts of services on the system. While I did RTFA, it seemed short on details. I would assume a retailer using DNS for RFID would have a private DNS network, much the same way Microsoft's Active Directory normally uses one (or maybe not- maybe one would just need a seperate RFID network of servers, since there is nothing inherantly private about RFID numbers and it might be helpful for a retailer to make the RFID lookup ability public).
Yet, that would only lead back to my original question. Are you going to seperate RFIDs into domains by number and then delgate them? That seems silly- imagine trying to put MAC address lookups on DNS. Does one retailer need to be able to access the RFIDs of another? Are we going to need to create root servers for RFID lookups? Please don't use those same root servers and please don't merge the network with the same public internet DNS system.
Perhaps the article was just short on details, or maybe I missed something, but I'm wary of using DNS for the sort of system the article described- at least before more details emerge.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Letting DNS Loose
Jan 02, 2004 | From CircleID Empowering DNS
By Paul Mockapetris
Most folks tend to think of the DNS as a way to map ASCII host names to IP addresses, perhaps www.nominum.com to 10.0.01 or some such.
I believe that when Vint talks about "escaping the bonds of DNS", [see BBC's report and Doug Mehus' CircleID report] he's really talking about letting it loose rather than replacing it.
In the case of ENUM and NAPTR, all we are doing is saying that "domain names can carry phone numbers, so why not let them". NAPTR is a DNS data type, so we aren't replacing DNS with NAPTR, that would make no sense. In fact the whole ENUM scheme is built out of classical DNS technology, and NAPTR is really just the latest data type to be added to the DNS (there's 40 or so). NAPTR is also just an extension of SRV, which was an extension of MX, which are DNS data types that Active Directory uses to start itself and the Internet uses to route each piece of mail.
RFID tags, UPC codes, International characters in email addresses and host names, and a variety of other identifiers could all go into DNS, and folks have occasionally proposed doing just that. Its really just a question of figuring out how to use the DNS -- its ready to carry arbitrary identifiers. And by the way, this isn't a new idea, see RFC 1101 for proof, although even earlier I designed the DNS in the early 1980s to allow it to be so, but it seemed too far fetched to document for a while.
But don't think that I'm claiming to have solved the whole problem. What I certainly didn't anticipate was the political, legal, and commercial fight that would come with it. These squabbles behind ENUM and RFID use of DNS are really the problem, not the technology, although there may be ways to help with more technology. I was in Geneva for a WSIS meeting of CTOs, and was surprised that the various organizations (ITU, ICANN, ISOC) haven't figured out that they need each other to make this technology work, rather than asserting ownership.
While it is inevitable that the DNS gets replaced, I think there could be far more usage and opportunity if the political aspects were addressed coherently, and if the technology types just let experimentation happen, rather than trying to make rules about how the DNS is used.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Actually, there already are provisions for this.
The SRV record, defined in rfc2782, is used to store a HOST:PORT pair
When will browsers (or anything else for that matter) start supporting this???
Here is a (possibly outdated) list of software that supports the SRV record.
comment directly in my journal
new to ldap huh? DNS doesnt store the actuall AD Data, those are on datafiles on the AD Servers (Ya i was shocked at that too), DNS simply holds pointers to find the services supplided and used by the directory, just like every other use of DNS.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
- rrset-order is still broken.
- GSS-TSIG support is still missing.
- Strange multi-threading bugs still exist
- Awful security history isn't behind it yet.
Oddly enough, the expensive Nominum commercial product has all these things fixed and BIND does not, even though ISC and Nominum are the same set of folks, in the same building.Does this sound like bullshit to you ? If so, see the following:
- Read the bottom parts of this
and the links at the bottom of this
- Nominum/ISC relationship described here
Of course, the trouble is that there's not many alternatives. DJBDNS is stable, but missing features and has an odd "semi-open-source" license. ( Also, if you read some of the links, Dan's a really cranky source of supportAAARRGGHH.
Domains aren't arranged the way they are just as a convention of days past. They're arranged in a hierarchical to distribute the load of DNS lookups as well as provide as logical way to diving responsibilities for different domains (zones). Also, the hierarchical structure allows for duplicate names as long as those two names aren't sibling nodes in the DNS tree (I can have google.com and google.noodle.com). With single word domains all of a sudden your available choies would decrease dramatically.
he's referring to the fact that www.whitehouse.com is a porn website, and not the whitehouse website.
No, the reason TLDs are limited is so that the root nameservers only need to keep state for a few different identifiers. If you allow an arbitrary number of them, the roots will slow down to a crawl.
This is the same reason that class C IP addresses are such a problem - there's too many of them to do a lookup quickly.