renumbering and roaming

Tue May 19 08:14:51 UTC 1998

On Mon, 18 May 1998, Michael S. Fischer wrote:
> Support a .local. root domain in your DNS servers.  Examples of DNS
> hostnames would be mail.local., ntp.local., news.local., etc.  When a
> roamer dials up he generally uses the DNS servers assigned by the NAS;

I did think of this a while ago, and nearly proposed it on NANOG, because at 
first it seems stunningly simple and trivial, but then...
a) if you have separate resolvers to nameservers (former being just caches
with no primary/secondary domains hosted, thus avoiding downtime during
reloading), you don't want to pollute your resolvers
b) the client needs to have a starting point for his/her resolvers, i.e. an
IP address, which you want on YOUR network not their home ISPs, and if they
carry their resolver configuration over...

So, although I think it's not a bad idea, there are significant snags, but a
lot can be done with this.

If the IP addresses were fixed, or at least for a pair of resolvers, perhaps
each ISP should have appropriate reverse DNS set up, e.g. 
relay1.mail.uk.psinet.LOCAL, so that internal traffic and email headers made
sense, otherwise it'd make spammers life a lot easier.

> these addresses would be authoritative on a provider-by-provider
> basis.  If all networks supported this schema all users could simply
> have these addresses coded into their client software and would
> connect to the proper machines as they differ on various networks.

Yes, each ISP would hack their systems to have their own "root" nameserver for
.local, and be authoritative for the forward and reverse. 

> iPass is currently building an Internet-Draft specifying the details
> of this approach.  What do you think?

I'll confess to not being a big fan of the way iPass works... good idea, but
the implementation is not as sophisticated as I'd like (we are a partner and
use an adapted anti-spam toolkit etc for our mail relays).

Paul
----
P Mansfield, Senior SysAdmin PSINet, +44-1223-577577x2611/577611 fax:577600 
*** If a grand piano had a rubout key, I'd be a concert pianist by now! ***