On Feb 22, 2008, at 8:16 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
From: Randall Atkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The overwhelming majority of users/deployments today are unable to
distinguish "DNS service unavailable" from "network down".
...
I think this means that being more explicitly reliant on DNS service
availability now, versus 20 years ago, is widely acceptable.
True, and a good point, but... We do need to distingiush between "a
member of
the set of things required to be operational in order for normal
users to be
able to do stuff" and "a dependency loop which could prevent network
engineering personnel from repairing a fault" - the latter set
should be
empty!
It may be that DNS itself (at least, the human readable part) becomes
less important to end users in the future. The point of indirection
between namespaces, and the corresponding lookup service, is no doubt
useful. However, there seems to be new human-friendly names emerging
that end users prefer over direct DNS interaction (e.g. links in
search engine results, bookmarks in browsers, etc). These names may
or may not bypass DNS. Perhaps in the future folks will be unable to
distinguish between "network down" and "favorite web portal down" -
especially if most of their services are part of said portal. Or
maybe something like "skype works, but i can't get my mail".
Given this, how are we scoping the "routing" part of the problem? Or
perhaps, what is the nature of the service provided by the routing
system (where failure of this service defines a fault)? For example,
given a sender knows of "some" name for the destination, and there
exists a viable hop-by-hop router path between these endpoints, is it
acceptable for delivery of packets along that path to depend on a box/
service that is off-path and perhaps unreachable? If the delivery
requires mapping one name to another, must this mapping mechanism
reside along the path (i.e. basically become part of the routing
system)? If so, this would seem to make it easier to compare the
complexity of different routing approaches. Otherwise, the service
provided by the various approaches is probably different.
R,
Dow
--
to unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the
word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
archive: <http://psg.com/lists/rrg/> & ftp://psg.com/pub/lists/rrg
