On 6/8/23, 11:23 PM, "DNSOP on behalf of Bob Bownes -Seiri" <dnsop-boun...@ietf.org on behalf of bow...@seiri.com> wrote:
>I would posit that the potential to view the word as offensive has increased >as language usage has changed in the intervening years since it was first used >in this context. Researching a now-abandoned draft on the origin of domain names, I struggled to find dictionary definition of 'resolve' that matched what we now call DNS resolution. In the early IEN and RFC (Internet Engineering Notes and Request for Comments), the first uses of 'resolve' were in the context of a group of people deciding on a path forward. As in "the committee resolved to investigate..." It wasn't until I asked the authors of one of the old RFCs (I now forget which one) where the term 'resolve' began to mean mapping a name to a network address. The answer was 'from the field of compiler design.' As in resolving a variable name to a memory location. In hindsight, this was obvious but trying to go from dictionary definitions and common use then and now, I didn't see the link. As far as 'lame' - besides the term sliding from being an objective assessment to a derogatory term as time goes by, it's meaning in the DNS context is not clear. The use I am familiar with covers a server's response to a query for a name for which the server has absolutely no information, as opposed to looking at a delegation set which has 'issues.' Both of those deserve terms and different ones as they are different situations. I'm not sure the case of a server receiving a query for which it has no information is very important anymore. Servers now will return either SERVFAIL or REFUSED for it and the operationally impacting situation I was working has been mitigated by this. However, I have seen a situation when earnest traffic (not DDoS flood) has been sent to a server that was not (yet) configured for a zone. But this happened once and was taken care of locally once the sender of the traffic realized what they were doing (or hadn't done). Perhaps the use of 'lame' for this can be left in the dustbin, like so many other objects we no longer use in life. Perhaps the queries are just 'out of bailiwick' queries relative to the server. As far as assessing the health of a parent to child delegation, I'll leave terminology about that to those who work that area. Broken, damaged, etc., but I bet that just about any descriptive term today may drift into other meanings as languages evolve. _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
