Paul Vixie On What DNS Is Not

CowboyRobot writes "Paul Vixie (AboveNet, ARIN, ISC, MAPS, PAIX) has a fresh rant titled What DNS Is Not about the abuses of the Domain Name Server system. 'What DNS is not is a mapping service or a mechanism for delivering policy-based information. DNS was designed to express facts, not policies. Because it works so well and is ubiquitous, however, it's all too common for entrepreneurs to see it as a greenfield opportunity ... a few years ago VeriSign, which operates the .COM domain under contract to ICANN, added a "wild card" to the top of the .COM zone (*.COM) so that its authoritative name servers would no longer generate NXDOMAIN responses. Instead they generated responses containing the address of SiteFinder's Web site — an advertising server.'"

Comments

Re:CDNs are good thing

[Ash-Fox]

Note: Most large CDNs are setup to use anycast, from Akamai to Google - although Akamai makes use of also DNS geolocation in certain instances.

And you'd be completely, utterly wrong.

...

I've seen anycast resulting some mind-numblingly stupid site selection choices, usually due to a local ISP's BGP policy - and when I say "stupid" I mean "all users of ISP X in New York City getting sent to a mirror in Sydney, Australia instead of the site downtown".

So, a configuration error from one ISP makes it completely, utterly wrong for every single person everywhere and these sort of errors are less likely to occur with DNS geolocation which work based on the resolver's geo ip location (note that international ISPs like Roadrunner, Virgin, AOL have the same DNS entries with transparent caching setups at various points) rather than what is most of the time, correctly configured network peering?

You're funny, can I subscribe to your newsletter?

Did TFA do ANY fact-checking?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Just in the first paragraph:

DNS (Domain Name System) is a hierarchical, distributed, autonomous, reliable database.

How is it autonomous? Or at least, how is it more autonomous than any other database, certainly any database which meets the other three criteria?

The first and only of its kind,

Sorry, no. Maybe the first, but it's certainly not the only. There are many other databases which offer distributed, reliable storage, and at least one I can think of which is hierarchical.

it offers realtime performance levels

Realtime? Are you sure?

I mean, aside from slow DNS servers, there's the fact that while reads may be realtime, updates are anything but. Just try changing IPs and watch how long it takes the change to propagate. Real databases measure this kind of thing in seconds or minutes -- DNS measures it in days.

Every TCP/IP traffic flow including every World Wide Web page view begins with at least one DNS transaction.

Bullshit. Want proof? Buy a Linksys router and hit http://192.168.1.1/ to configure it. Well, look at that! No DNS needed!

There are indeed people who run webpages off of IPs.

Alright, I didn't have to rip it apart that much, and maybe I'm nitpicking. But come on, the number of things which are simply wrong is staggering -- the BS-to-word-count ratio is quite high.

Do I want to read the rest of the article?

Maybe. It seems much cleaner and more accurate than that first paragraph, but it wouldn't have been that hard, especially for a guy with those credentials, to get it right.