On 05/31/2018 05:39 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
On May 31, 2018, at 4:27 PM, Michael Thomas <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
With a CNAME, you wouldn't need to deprecate the other... it's just
an alias that you have control of.
From the UI perspective, whatever is presenting names to the user can
prefer the human-given name over
the auto-generated name, right? We wouldn't need to standardize
anything then.
Michael, I don't think you've really understood the issue here. Let
me try and explain it all at once, since the explanation was actually
scattered across several messages.
There are two pieces to this. First, there's the thing that
publishes the name. That's DNSSD. There's no problem with that end
of things. If you change the name, the device just appears with its
new name, and everything is fine. That's our piece of the puzzle, and
it already works.
The problem is that hosts tend to remember names. On MacOS, for
instance, if you configure a printer, the host remembers the printer
forevermore. It's no problem to configure a new printer, but if you
change the name that the printer advertises, there will be a stale
configuration on the host pointing to the old name, and the user will
have to configure a new printer to get access to the old printer.
So what we are talking about here actually /breaks/ DNSSD's good
behavior. We don't want DNSSD to publish two names. We don't want
DNSSD to publish a CNAME. That would just be extra garbage that
would have to be maintained forever.
No, no, no. That's not what i meant. I'm saying that a authoritative
server can create a CNAME based on the DNSSD name
which is the pretty name. So that when i type pretty-name.myhome.net
it's really pointing to ugly-name.
What we want is a way for the host to notice that the device's name
has changed. We want the device to have some identity other than the
name that doesn't change when the name changes. And we actually have
this in the registration protocol, which is another draft being
published in the DNSSD working group. That protocol has the host
generating a public/private key pair, and using the public key as an
identity. It uses this identity to claim the name, but it wouldn't
be that much work to also specify that hosts should use that
identifier to notice that a device has a new name and update the name
in the user interface.
What I'm thinking is that i plug something into my homenet, and i name
it. I could do that by logging into the device itself,
but creating a CNAME gives me some flexibility in that i don't have to
deal with its crappy interface, and survives when i throw
it in the trash. If it's normal DNS, it doesn't matter how/why the CNAME
was created, it just works.
Mike
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