summarising [was: Re: ICANNs role]

Tue Apr 3 21:32:51 UTC 2007

On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 09:16:47PM +0100, michael.dillon at bt.com wrote:
> 
> > Again - DNS is the infrastructure for EVERYTHING.  It facilitates
> > EVERYTHING.
> 
> Not so. On the public Internet applications like Edonkey and Emule work
> fine without it. We run a global IP network that is not connected to the
> public Internet and over 90% of our customers' applications don't use
> any DNS. They use IP addresses directly.

Fair.  If you have a small or stable enough private network that you
don't need to use DNS to look up things that might be different from
time to time, or to send e-mail by looking up where that mail goes, this
works.

I don't think it scales.

And at least one person claimed not to be using DNS at all ... I suspect
he just didn't know how it was priming his engine.

> DNS is only a facilitator for those applications that WANT to use it.
> And even though most current applications want to use DNS, they usually
> function just fine with straight IP addresses. DNS is more of a habit,
> than a necessity.

So is using the decimal system rather than counting sticks.  But it sure
makes things doable versus insurmountable.

> If the users of the Internet, collectively, decide that DNS is a bad
> habit, better to be avoided, then you will see more and more
> applications that work around the DNS. Like ICQ. Or they will only use
> the DNS minimally in order to root their own namespaces, like LDAP with
> RFC 2247.

Lots of little edge apps.  No core scalability.

-- 
Joe Yao
Analex Contractor