> >those situations, which are becoming, increasingly common, DNS is being
> >used as sort of a yellow pages service lookup rather than a white pages
> >address lookup.
>
> As has been discussed many times in the past, the yellow pages "search" use
> of the DNS is an artifact of the current constraints on the name space,
> primarily putting many commercial groups into exactly one TLD.
You are correct.
I suspect that I wasn't clear in what I wrote and that I didn't really do
a good job of expressing what I wanted to say...
There is starting to be a move to do quasi-directory services that use DNS
protocols (and unwitting DNS clients.)
There are starting to be intermediary devices that intercept and
manipulate DNS queries in order to redirect things like HTTP sessions to
servers that are best suited to serve the user.
Thus, when one does a DNS query for the A record for "abc.foo.com" what
happens is that a DNS server isn't even reached, but rather that an
intermediary box will intercept the query, use "abc.foo.com" not as a DNS
name but rather as a service name, and return an address of something that
can provide that service and has net topology characteristics that make it
good for the client to use.
Companies like Inkatomi and (dare I say?) Cisco build things like this.
So what is happening is rather more than MX indirection.
> .... (Since you live in California, you might already know
> the domain name for Southwest Airlines, but I seriously doubt the average
> reader will be able to guess it.)
Great example! That one drove me crazy for a while as I too am infected
with the www.<companyname>.com disease.
For the reader: iflyswa.com
(Actually they now have the more "logical" domainname as well. Hopefully
they bought it rather than coerced it.)
--karl--
