The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse (was Re: Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?)

Brad Knowles brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Tue Jul 5 23:06:15 UTC 2005


At 6:11 PM -0400 2005-07-05, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

>>  	I disagree.  The problem is that there are too many alternatives.
>
>  To many alt-roots?  Or too many alt-TLD's?

	Too many of the former is likely to lead to having too many of 
the latter.  Both are bad.

>>  	The problem is that they are pretty much guaranteed to get at
>>  cross-purposes.
>
>  Well, there have been alt-root zones available for, what 6 or 7 years
>  now?  And how many collisions have there actually been in practice?  2?
>  3?

	We have not yet hit the knee of the curve.

>>  	I don't think that's really practical.  I'm sorry, I just don't
>>  trust them to write a resolver that's going to get included in libc
>>  (or wherever), and for which the world is going to be dependant.
>
>  Well, I meant "at your customer recursive resolver servers", since the
>  topic at hand was "what do IAP's do to support their retail customers",
>  but...

	I don't trust them to write code that will be used in 
mission-critical situations or places, regardless of where that is.

	It's not that they don't have the best intentions -- I'm sure 
that at least some of them do.  It's that they don't have the 
necessary experience.


	The people I would trust to have enough of the right experience 
to make something like this work (if that's possible at all) are the 
same people who wrote Nominum's ANS and CNS.  However, I suspect that 
they would probably be about the last people in the world who would 
be interested in trying to make something like this work.

>>  People will always be able to access data by pure IP address, or
>>  choosing to use the real root servers.  Push come to shove, and the
>>  real root servers could be proxied through other systems via other
>>  methods.
>
>  "Real" is *such* a metaphysical term here, isn't it?  :-)

	Heh.  Shall we use the term IRS?  As in Incumbent Root Servers?

>>  	The reverse problem is more difficult to deal with -- that of
>>  people wanting to access Chinese (or whatever) sites that can only be
>>  found in the Chinese-owned alternative root.
>
>  Stipulated.  But whose problem *is* that?

	The users will make it our problem, if we don't get this sorted out soon.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.



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