on 3/5/2003 8:58 PM Joe Abley wrote:
I think Bill's point was that if a distributed database is required to contain routing policy, why not use existing distributed database infrastructure to host it (i.e. the DNS).
I think it is fair to say that the delegation chain in the DNS is demonstrably more effective in allowing authoritative records to be located than the ad-hoc partial-mesh of mirroring and key replication currently found in the IRR.
Delegation is different from content. Using DNS for delegation information makes a lot of sense, but trying to use it for complex content is just a bad idea. DNS is great for lightweight fast lookups of public-access data, but its not well suited to complex query structures, authenticated access, or multi-dimensional, time-sensitive data. As an analogy, everybody agrees that DNS should (must) be used for tasks like ~find the mail server, but nobody should seriously argue that we should use DNS to hold ~RFC822/MIME messages and entities. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/