Multiple Roots are "a good thing" - Karl Auerbach

Mon Mar 19 04:32:21 UTC 2001

At 03:47 PM 3/18/01 -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> > I would suggest that telephone books/directories are not an appropriate
> > analogy. Rather, DNS is a lot closer to the internal plumbing of the net -
> > more akin to Signalling System #7. I'd guess that for 95% or more of phone
> > calls, the caller already knows the numeric phone number in question -
> > while for the Internet, very few people give their email addresses as
> > mfidelman at 207.226.172.79 or http://207.226.172.79. Telephone directories
> > are optional in most cases, DNS is not.
>
>You are absolutely correct.  :-)
>
>Telephone directories are most definitely *not* like the DNS.

I don't get this argument at all. A telephone white pages lookup takes a 
name [a-z + 0-9] and looks up a number [0-9]. DNS does exactly the same 
thing. The only difference is a hierarchical naming convention in DNS which 
specifies/delegates where the information is stored. The information could 
reside in the same place, or be distributed.

>A directory is something that
>can be searched with approximate matches.  Because the DNS is
>"D"istributed, it is literally impossible search it that way (and if
>there were multiple roots then all users would really be up the creek
>without the proverbial paddle!).

DNS can be searched up, down and sideways. It may change the normal query 
method or add additional transactions to a lookup, but it can be searched 
and indexed. The questions are "does the index scale" and "does it matter"?

Best Regards,

Simon Higgs

--
It's a feature not a bug...