What DNS Is Not

Paul Vixie vixie at isc.org
Mon Nov 9 20:00:49 UTC 2009


i loved the henry ford analogy -- but i think henry ford would have said that
the automatic transmission was a huge step forward since he wanted everybody
to have a car.  i can't think of anything that's happened in the automobile
market that henry ford wouldn't've wished he'd thought of.

i knew that the "incoherent DNS" market would rise up on its hind legs and
say all kinds of things in its defense against the ACM Queue article, and i'm
not going to engage with every such speaker.

there three more-specific replies below.

Dave Temkin <davet1 at gmail.com> writes:

> Alex Balashov wrote:
>>
>> For example, perhaps in the case of CDNs geographic optimisation should
>> be in the province of routing (e.g. anycast) and not DNS?
>
> In most cases it already is.  He completely fails to address the concept
> of Anycast DNS and assumes people are using statically mapped resolvers.

"anycast DNS" appears to mean different things to different people.  i didn't
mention it because to me anycast dns is a bgp level construct whereby the
same (coherent) answer is available from many servers having the same IP
address but not actually being the same server.  see for example how several
root name servers are distributed.  <http://www.root-servers.org/>.  if you
are using "anycast DNS" to mean carefully crafted (noncoherent) responses
from a similarly distributed/advertised set of servers, then i did address
your topic in the ACM Queue article.

David Andersen <dga at cs.cmu.edu> writes:

> This myth ... was debunked years ago:
>
> "DNS Performance and the Effectiveness of Caching"
> Jaeyeon Jung, Emil Sit, Hari Balakrishnan, and Robert Morris
> http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/dns:ton.pdf

my reason for completely dismissing that paper at the time it came out was
that it tried to predict the system level impact of DNS caching while only
looking at the resolver side and only from one client population having a
small and uniform user base.  show me a "trace driven simulation" of the
whole system, that takes into account significant authority servers (which
would include root, tld, and amazon and google) as well as significant
caching servers (which would not include MIT's or any university's but
which would definitely include comcast's and cox's and att's), and i'll
read it with high hopes.  note that ISC SIE (see http://sie.isc.org/ may
yet grow into a possible data source for this kind of study, which is one
of the reasons we created it.)

Simon Lyall <simon at darkmere.gen.nz> writes:

> I heard some anti-spam people use DNS to distribute big databases of
> information. I bet Vixie would have nasty things to say to the guy who
> first thought that up.

someone made this same comment in the slashdot thread.  my response there
and here is: the MAPS RBL has always delivered coherent responses where the
answer is an expressed fact, not kerned in any way based on the identity of
the querier.  perhaps my language in the ACM Queue article was imprecise 
("delivering facts rather than policy") and i should have stuck with the
longer formulation ("incoherent responses crafted based on the identity of
the querier rather than on the authoritative data").
-- 
Paul Vixie
KI6YSY




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