Comments in line...

On 28 Feb 2013, at 22:09, Michael Thomas <[email protected]> wrote:

> In general, I do not think this is ready to go. From what I can see, there is
> a significant amount of disagreement about whether mdns and/or sd have a
> place in the homenet architecture, and more than a little bit of groping
> around as to what the problems are that need to be solved. This section is
> both prescriptive in ways it ought not be, and speculative in ways that an
> architecture document shouldn't be doing. I personally think that enumerating
> requirements for what any solution ought to solve for is way more important,
> but is sadly lacking in this section.

The aim of the document is to discuss the principles involved.

> I think there is an unanswered question in this wg as to whether
> naming should take a posture of how to integrate local naming into a wider
> global scope, or figuring out how to adapt globally scoped naming into a
> local context. In practical terms: whether we start with mdns and .local
> and figure out how to hack it, or do we start with DNS and figure out how
> to make it work against requirements. I will again say that the lack of
> well agreed requirements for what we're doing hinders resolving this
> question.

I don't think that needs to be dictated here.  We should be able to drive that 
from the principles that we can (hopefully) reach consensus on.

> 3.7.1 Service Discovery
> 
> This section starts out with telling us how it will be presented to the user 
> (GUI)
> without any reference to why a user or anything else needs service discovery.
> As service discovery is not common on the internet today, I think this 
> requires
> a lot more motivation/requirements before jumping and telling us that out of
> scope GUI's will come to the rescue -- it's not even clear that 
> machine-machine
> interfaces to find and configure, say, my IP speakers to my IP home 
> entertainment
> system won't be the norm.

Service discovery *is* common in home networks today.  Currently users see such 
SD via whatever GUIs they use.  But sure, the future is likely to also include 
device to device SD.

> Bottom line: remove the "how" and get immediately to the "why". Then we
> can have a discussion.
> 
> 3.7.2 Assigning Names
> 
> I think this can be easily rewritten to not need any informative references 
> to yet
> to be approved drafts that are not agreed upon.

That reference to mDNS has been removed. 

> 3.7.3 Namespaces
> 
> It's not clear to me why a single namespace is "desirable". Do rebellious 
> teenagers
> really want to be part of their fuddy-duddy parent's namespace? Does it even
> matter, architecturally? At least some motivation would be helpful. Part of my
> uncomfort here is that there is a hidden assumption that a "home" is an 
> indivisible
> unit. Is that really true?

A fair point, a homenet realm may have its own namespace, potentially.  Or any 
specific device could always independently use some 3rd party dynamic DNS 
service.

> I'm not sure why ISP provided naming should be considered the default: we 
> really
> don't know what will be the case, and obviously ISP's have a big downside both
> from changing ISP's, as well as the multiple-ISP's standpoint. I think that 
> we can more
> safely say that this service is just some "cloud" service provided somewhere 
> on the
> net since there isn't any locality requirement that I'm aware of.

Downgraded to 'likely'.

> This section dwells in solution space far more than I think it ought, and is 
> highly
> speculative (eg, .sitelocal, ulqdn, etc). Instead of speculating, it would be 
> better
> to say what characteristics we want, and what requirements we need to fulfill.

Trimmed a little in response.

> 3.7.4 Homenet name service
> 
> Somewhere in this document we really need to make clear how mobility figures 
> into
> all of this. That is, what happens when things move around and what the 
> implications
> are for naming, both in my home, and on yours.
> 
> I don't think we should compare and contrast mdns as being "zeroconf" with
> the implication that DNS is not. You can achieve "zeroconf" using service
> announcement and not require multicast at all (at least not to announce the
> service). In fact, until we have something resembling rough consensus, I don't
> really think it's appropriate to favor one or the other in this document.

I don't think the document does favour either.  
> 
> Again, ditch the references to ISP with something "cloud-like".

Good idea. Or both.

> I don't understand what mDNS has to do with service announcement to a
> repository. mDNS is a way to find names in lieu of a repository (that is, each
> device is it's own authoritative name service). Sending naming/service 
> announcements
> to a repository is an adjunct of the repository protocols and has nothing to 
> do
> with mDNS that I can figure out.

Well, a device in a homenet today will commonly use both unicast and multicast 
DNS, the former for internal devices, the latter for external.

> More speculation about mDNS vs. SRV records without any motivation of what
> is trying to be accomplished and why... it just sort of appears out of thin 
> air here.

So the important aspect is that devices can register themselves with a name 
service that would typically be hosted on the CER (and secondaried elsewhere).

> I think more thought needs to be given to adding names automatically to a
> repository. It mentions that a user may choose to do so, but what if there's
> no meaningful "user" such as my IP-speakers with no UI? Should it try or not?
> (I think it ought, but that's me). More to the point: what are the 
> implications
> of things that don't have meaningful UI's.

To be defined.  But noted.

> There should be some more discussion of the differences between a locally
> significant domain name, and a globally significant one. What happens
> when people camp on names they don't own? How might that interact with
> mobility?

Not sure what you mean here.

> More speculation about dnydns without any motivation for why it's interesting
> and/or significant.
> 
> There seems to be no mention of the relationship between local/home resolvers
> if the local resolver isn't the authoritative resolver. In particular, it's 
> not an
> unusual situation to have a "cloud" (read: high bandwidth, well connected...)
> authoritative dns  be a slave to a local master. Or if you don't like that, 
> some
> other way to achieve similar goals of not wanting my home network have to
> know how to deal with ddos's on nameservers, as one for-instance.

I think that's not precluded.  The key bit is the homenet must be able to 
operate if disconnected.


> 3.7.5 Independent Operation
> 
> I'm generally skeptical that anything these days works well when you pull
> the plug on the Internet. There are so many hidden assumptions about
> connectivity that I don't think we should try to do anything heroic here.

Sure. It's a fair goal though.

> 3.7.6 Considerations for LLN's
> 
> First I'll say that it's not just LLN's that have problems with chatty 
> networks:
> it's anything with a battery. This should be rewritten from that perspective 
> and
> stay away from speculation about whether proxies are needed for a particular
> technology that doesn't necessarily have consensus.
> 
> More to the point: this architecture should have considerations throughout 
> about
> battery driven devices and their considerations, and not just whether mdns 
> will
> cause daily trips to the store to buy new batteries.

One for Anders to comment on, perhaps...

> 3.7.7 DNS resolver discovery
> 
> I don't understand this section: is there anything we need to do beyond what
> SLAAC and/or DHCP do now? If there is, it might be nice to enumerate what
> the problem is.

This came up from Jari's own experiments.  It implies stateless DHCP is 
available, or that the resolver address(es) are propagated by some other means.

> ---
> Overall, section 3.7 leaves me more confused than enlightened. It reads more
> like a stream of consciousness than an architecture.

For the reason Ted has observed.  I agree it needs to be tighter, preferably.

tim

> 
> Mike
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