On 22 Jul, 2004, at 12:12, Jim Reid wrote:
"Joao" == Joao Damas <Joao_Damas@isc.org> writes:
BN: cc list has been trimmed as everyone there is already on dns-wg@ripe.net
Well, what other choice is there? :-) And anyway, since the overwhelming bulk of the world's name servers are IPv4-only, resolution over IPv6 doesn't seem to be a particularly productive exercise. True enough.
Joao> True enough for what subset of users? If the a user is Joao> interested in only a few and those provide the service that Joao> user needs and uses, what does he/she care about a million Joao> servers out there?
It's not that simple Joao. If only it could be that simple...
Have you forgotten the IPv6 migration issues that Johan Ihren and others have mentioned at previous WG meetings?
No, I have discussed them with Johan on occasion. Does that mean we are to seat down and do nothing? The problems are known and there are proposed solutions. At the same time the RSSAC was working on producing the recommendation for the IANA to accept AAAA in the root zone, it also discussed how to start this transition for the root-servers.net zone and the respective glue.
Some IPv6 users will drop DNS over IPv4 as soon as they see AAAAs for TLD name servers. Or, worse, for the root servers. They may not realise or understand that this will cut them off from most of the internet. Which you seem to be saying is fine. If all they're interested in is the IPv6 internet, let them just get access to that. I'd agree with that sentiment if we knew for sure we were talking about informed, knowledgeable users. But I'm not convinced that's the case.
Did not know about your baby-sitting activities. You can't protect users from every possible mistake. You should analyse problems and recommend sensible defaults, while avoiding troublesome choices but this should not prevent progress. You can;t just sit around saying "oh, but there are all these unknowns and a choice is so hard..."
Even so this approach brings more problems. Firstly, it highlights the lack of a migration strategy for introducing DNS over IPv6. We still don't know what's going to break, how those failures will manifest themselves and what the consequences of that will be. Both for applications/resolvers and for name servers.
A lot of this has been done or is being done.
For instance, what will my IPv6 web browser do when lookups over IPv6 for www.google.com return only A records?
What do you mean "your IPv6 web browser"?
Or SERVFAIL? Second of all, a piecemeal introduction of AAAA glue could be destablising for the DNS and the internet. We just don't know either way, so we should proceed carefully with a good understanding of the consequences of these changes. Thirdly, this could also put pressure on other TLDs to add AAAA glue -- "because others are doing this" -- before they're ready to do so.
Some people put non-conformant javascript and HTML in their web pages, they count on error handling, or lack thereof, of particular web browsers to put out web pages that can only be seen by those web browsers... Of course changes need to be done in a responsible way and I am taking personal offence if you would suggest that I would not follow that path.
Finally, by encouraging the IPv6-only people to go off into their own little world, we fragment the internet and its name space.
No, you just are not getting it. I am talking about enabling, you are talking about limiting.
At the very least, it will mean some IPv6-ers are likely to develop a mindset that DNS migration to IPv6 is done and there's nothing more for them to do as far as IPv6 and the DNS is concerned.
Since when has that been possible for any protocol that is used on the Internet? DNS, the protocol, keeps changing and adding new possibilities, just like most other Internet protocols. The bottom line: it is time to get going. Joao