On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Mohsen Souissi wrote:
Bill & all,
On 07 Jun, bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com wrote: | > of wasteful usage of IPv4 address space: the /8s that Stanford and MIT | > have for instance. | | er... MIT & MERIT... stanford returned theirs years ago... | | now if i understood Ed, both he and you are tangentially | arguing for in-baliwick glue. why was this considered such | bad practice last decade, but now seems to be not only | prefered but the only choice for right-thinking people?
==> I don't think anybody expressed the "in-baliwick glue" as "the only choice for right-thinking people" nor do I think that anybody was trying to show people how to "right-think" about NS's naming for a TLD delegation...
The name compression technique which maybe was considered as "a bad practice" a decade ago has become more popular for the last 3-5 years. Btw I don't think this technique is "outdated" today as Ed said since the alternative he mentioned (Anycast) is not widely deployed yet by TLDs (only a few TLDs are anycast today and still some political and technical issues to be solved... Just think for instance at IPv6 allocation policy which does't allow yet TLDs in the RIPE region to get an "unfiltered" block... Yes I know, a new proposal is underway to be adopted by the RIPE address-policy wg...). IMHO, the name compression popularity relies on two facts today:
- it addresses and mitigates new technical issues which didn't use to occurr frequently a decade ago, such as riskk of glue dropping due to new "greedy" RRs such as AAAA or DNSSEC-related RRs. So compression may save a large amount of bytes which may be transformed in a new NS deployment (icluding its A/AAAA glues);
- TLDs which are not yet deploying DNS anycast are endeavouring to get a suitable level of redundancy and load distribution among their deployed NS's. As the number of deployed NS's grows, it becomes very practical and interesting to have a naming plan easing the readability and consequently the operation of name service...
Hence, it is seen by a number of TLDs today that name compression is a good and workable technique, in the absence of a better technique (yet to be easily deployable)...
Just my .02 euro: Using glue (or to use a redundant term: in-bailiwick glue) helps to avoid dependency loops as well. ie: example.com nameservers exist under example.net and vice versa. IMHO a good thing. Roy