At 03:47 PM 3/18/01 -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
I would suggest that telephone books/directories are not an appropriate analogy. Rather, DNS is a lot closer to the internal plumbing of the net - more akin to Signalling System #7. I'd guess that for 95% or more of phone calls, the caller already knows the numeric phone number in question - while for the Internet, very few people give their email addresses as mfidelman@207.226.172.79 or http://207.226.172.79. Telephone directories are optional in most cases, DNS is not.
You are absolutely correct. :-)
Telephone directories are most definitely *not* like the DNS.
I don't get this argument at all. A telephone white pages lookup takes a name [a-z + 0-9] and looks up a number [0-9]. DNS does exactly the same thing. The only difference is a hierarchical naming convention in DNS which specifies/delegates where the information is stored. The information could reside in the same place, or be distributed.
A directory is something that can be searched with approximate matches. Because the DNS is "D"istributed, it is literally impossible search it that way (and if there were multiple roots then all users would really be up the creek without the proverbial paddle!).
DNS can be searched up, down and sideways. It may change the normal query method or add additional transactions to a lookup, but it can be searched and indexed. The questions are "does the index scale" and "does it matter"? Best Regards, Simon Higgs -- It's a feature not a bug...