On Tue, 13 Mar 2001 12:54:42 PST, Roeland Meyer said:
By the sheer fact that they included a non-technical value-judgment.
OK.. I'm going to cite chapter and verse: Summary To remain a global network, the Internet requires the existence of a globally unique public name space. The DNS name space is a hierarchical name space derived from a single, globally unique root. This is a technical constraint inherent in the design of the DNS. Therefore it is not technically feasible for there to be more than one root in the public DNS. That one root must be supported by a set of coordinated root servers administered by a unique naming authority. Put simply, deploying multiple public DNS roots would raise a very strong possibility that users of different ISPs who click on the same link on a web page could end up at different destinations, against the will of the web page designers. This does not preclude private networks from operating their own private name spaces, but if they wish to make use of names uniquely defined for the global Internet, they have to fetch that information from the global DNS naming hierarchy, and in particular from the coordinated root servers of the global DNS naming hierarchy. OK? Read that. Read it again. Read it a third time. *ALL* that says is "If you want to agree what the DNS tree looks like, you have to share a root. If you want your own view, use your own root. That's the way DNS is. You're stuck with the fact that DNS works that way. You have to make your own choice which root to use". This is *NOT* rocket science. Geez. Now, given that they *SAY* right there in that third paragraph that you're *TOTALLY* free to use your own root, but if you want to agree with the rest of the world you have to share a root, what value judgment are THEY making? OK? Let me repeat that *AGAIN* for the clue-challenged: RFC2826 SAYS YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE FOR YOURSELF. Which is more important to *YOU*? 100% consistency with the rest of the world, or access to your private name space? *YOU* evaluate, *YOU* choose, and RFC2826 is nice enough to point out the problems you'll encounter. Let me repeat that *ONE MORE* time. RFC2826 SAYS YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE FOR YOURSELF. Now, what non-technical value judgment did you say that RFC2826 was making for you? It's not a "value judgment" that using multiple roots with DNS results in inconsistencies, it's *the way DNS works*. I suppose the *next* thing we'll see is people complaining that the concept of CIDR is an evil value judgement, because you need to decide what aggregation to do in order to keep the routing table a manageable size. And sometime in May, we'll have the complaints that IP addresses are political because they only allow 256 values per octet, and a class-action lawsuit is planned for the number 257, 258, -3, and all the fractions. Now - I'll *readily* agree that "ICANN versus new.net" is political, and probably worth discussing. However, I'm going to have to start putting Bozo Flags on people who *still* claim that RFC2826 is political just because it points out that Things Will Provably Break if you have conflicting roots. -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech