FIBER CUT: Dallas to West Coast

Fri Aug 31 02:50:52 UTC 2001

> > DNS in lieu of a routing protocol make me uncomfortable.

> I agree, using DNS in lieu of routing makes me uncomfortable.

> I would rather add a new floor on top, than trying to jack up the foundation
> and change the basement.

The basement is what's leaking. A new roof won't help.

Also, DNS has loads of issues here which make it somewhat unsuitable for this
purpose [1].

Another point, you would be bumping up the DNS cache sizes dramatically.
Ass-u-me a 300 byte response for every query, and it really starts adding up,
especially if you are talking about /24 or heaven forbid /32 entries. You
would almost certainly run out of usable memory on your DNS caches long before
you had solved the original problem.

All told, better to fix the routing system than to lay it on DNS.

[1] http://www.ehsco.com/misc/draft-hall-dns-data-00.txt which has not yet
been submitted pending supplementary statistical research

--
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/