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."

Comments

mDNS & Rendezvous?

[AT]

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).

Re:mDNS & Rendezvous?

[keithmoore]

mDNS is a huge mess, mostly because Apple started deploying the thing without realizing that you'd have different hosts on the same network, some using mDNS and some using DNS (since not all hosts that are connected will see the same peers) and without bothering to figure out how to keep mDNS and DNS in sync.

the last time I looked the problem still wasn't solved. but the draft is in revision 27 after being taken on by an IETF working group, and still isn't done yet, which should tell you something about how ready it was for prime time when Apple shipped it.

the rest of Rendezvous (v4 linklocal addressing and DNS resource discovery) is also a huge mess, but that's another topic.

Re:naming conventions

[ultrapenguin]

Internet explorer can also auto-add www. + .com if you press ctrl+enter while typing the url.
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 .co.jp

I think MYIE2 has different modifiers, ctrl+enter adds .com, shift-enter adds .net, etc.

Re:WEB/FTP

[emptybody]

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.

How about fixing bind 9 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see...

• 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 support :) PowerDNS is promising, but just got recursion.

AAARRGGHH.