Dear colleagues, Perhaps it's to do with blood flow to my brain due to my experiences this week, but I've been contemplating some distinctions that we have perhaps not made as clearly as we might in respect of RFC 6761. This message is an attempt to lay those out.
RFC 6761 contains a number of questions for how to determine whether something is a special-use name, but I think there may be missing a distinction that is useful. It seems to me that, for any domain name, there are three things that are relevant: 1. The namespace. 2. The registry for that name (in the old-fashioned, not ICANN, sense) 3. The zone at that name. RFC 6761 appears to suggest that one should not have a special-use entry that definitely appears in the zone at the special-use name. I suggest in addition that we have a distinction to make. At least some special-use names are in-band signals of a protocol shift. For instance, logically speaking local in the root zone is not really a special name that is in the registry, but not in the zone. Instead, it's a signal that one should query on port 5353. (This does not mean you can't implement this with tricks in the DNS, or that you might not find some way to respond in DNS for local. queries; just that the _point_ of the string is a protocol switch.) Some other possible special-use names are really names that are expected to appear in DNS contexts _but_ that are not expected to resolve in the global DNS context. We can think of these as _negative_ entries in the target DNS registry: registrations that are supposed to prevent other registrations and are supposed to prevent DNS resolution in the global DNS. I think these distinctions need to be make clear. In addition, I think it would be really helpful if these distinctions were made in the special-use names registry document, which makes me think that RFC 6761bis is needed. I think this topic should be on the agenda for Prague. I also think that it would be really helpful to keep these distinctions present to mind in additional discussions of the topic. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan [email protected] _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
