Re: [NANOG] Re: new.net: yet another dns namespace overlay play
At 06:00 PM 3/7/2001, Vadim Antonov wrote:
The only real solutiuon to the present and future DNS woes is to replace it with the hyperlinks, portals, address books and search engines - and _no_ human-readable names. This effectively creates as many "roots" as there are users. My "John Doe" is not the same as your "John Doe" :)
For some reason, I can't see CNN broadcasting "Come visit our website, at 207.25.71.27 or 207.25.71.28 or 207.25.71.29 or 207.25.71.30 or 207.25.71.5 or 207.25.71.6 or 207.25.71.20 or 207.25.71.22 or 207.25.71.23 or 207.25.71.24 or or 207.25.71.25 or 207.25.71.26". Not to mention the fact that IPv6 will make that even uglier. I *like* DNS. Abolishing it would be akin to, say, removing the UNIX path environment variable and all aliasing/symlinking support from the kernel. ~Ben (I speak for myself, here) --- Ben Browning <benb@theriver.com> The River Internet Access Co. Network Operations 1-877-88-RIVER http://www.theriver.com
Build a search engine which takes "old" domain name "WWW.CNN.COM" and produces URL with 207.25.71.27 in it :) Even better, go to a real search engine and look for "CNN news US edition". I'm wondering how people managed to find CNN on TV -- after all, CNN ads didn't feature local channel numbers :) (BTW, if you're an Itailan, DNS is not a much of help if you want to find CNN - www.cnn.it is _not_ a real CNN :) And www.pbs.com is _not_ PBS TV, you should use www.pbs.org instead. And typing IRS into location bar of the browser gets you nowhere - www.irs.com is not the Internal Revenue Service, etc, etc. Cursory tour of DNS produces thousands of examples like those. The point is - hierarchical naming or categorization is not useful in general case. Ref: Jorge Luis Borges "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins". As for removing environment variables and symlinks... hmmm... people who built Unix in the first place certainly didn't like these features, and replaced them with much more generic concepts in Plan 9 and Inferno. --vadim On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Ben Browning wrote:
For some reason, I can't see CNN broadcasting "Come visit our website, at 207.25.71.27 or 207.25.71.28 or 207.25.71.29 or 207.25.71.30 or 207.25.71.5 or 207.25.71.6 or 207.25.71.20 or 207.25.71.22 or 207.25.71.23 or 207.25.71.24 or or 207.25.71.25 or 207.25.71.26". Not to mention the fact that IPv6 will make that even uglier.
I *like* DNS. Abolishing it would be akin to, say, removing the UNIX path environment variable and all aliasing/symlinking support from the kernel.
Vadim Antonov wrote:
(BTW, if you're an Itailan, DNS is not a much of help if you want to find CNN - www.cnn.it is _not_ a real CNN :) And www.pbs.com is _not_ PBS TV, you should use www.pbs.org instead. And typing IRS into location bar of the browser gets you nowhere - www.irs.com is not the Internal Revenue Service, etc, etc. Cursory tour of DNS produces thousands of examples like those.
The United States Postal Service registered both usps.gov and usps.com (and publicizes .com, FWIW). But I bet there are plenty of sites that didn't do that, or couldn't because the names were already taken.
The point is - hierarchical naming or categorization is not useful in general case.
You'd rather memorize IP addresses instead? You're a better man than I. :) /me rushes to register nanog.net and nanog.com. Woops; both are already taken. -- Steven J. Sobol/CTO/JustThe.net LLC | sjsobol@NorthShoreTechnologies.net SAY IT LOUD: I'M GEEK AND I'M PROUD! | 888.480.4NET (4638) 216.619.2NET (2638) http://NorthShoreTechnologies.net | http://ClevelandProductions.com http://JustThe.net | Powered by Linux, pizza, Coke, Cuervo, and cheap beer.
Vadim Antonov wrote:
Build a search engine which takes "old" domain name "WWW.CNN.COM" and produces URL with 207.25.71.27 in it :)
And then build wedges into operating systems and application software to automatically access this search engine when presented with names. Congratulations, you've just re-invented DNS, but with more overhead. No matter what you end up using, you are going to need some kind of directory service for users to look up the entities they are accessing. If DNS doesn't cut it for some applications, then perhaps another system can be added. One such example is the "Internet keywords" concept used by AOL and some web browsers. (See also http://www.realnames.com/) This doesn't require that the existing DNS system be trashed.
I'm wondering how people managed to find CNN on TV -- after all, CNN ads didn't feature local channel numbers :)
Most cable companies send customers a printed list of channel mappings, and mail out updates when the lineup changes. Or they just channel-surf and look at every single channel until they find it. Telephone systems (which are closer in magnitude to the internet than television systems) send customers printed directories every year and provide (usually for a fee) a directory assistance service. None of these systems work any better than DNS: - A quick reference card can't work when you've got millions of hosts. - Channel surfing is equally useless. The internet is several orders of magnitude bigger than a television system. - Printed directories are impractical and expensive. Given the rate of change, you'd need to reissue it at least once a month. Putting the directory on CD-ROM may help with the publication costs, but you would still need to distribute them. And customers will have to pay for a subscription to this. And you'd still need a directory service in order to allow access to nodes that are added/changed and have not yet gotten into the directory. If you end up relying on an on-line service, then you've just re-invented DNS. -- David
On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 07:38:37PM -0800, Vadim Antonov wrote:
Even better, go to a real search engine and look for "CNN news US edition". I'm wondering how people managed to find CNN on TV -- after all, CNN ads didn't feature local channel numbers :)
For those with few enough channels, they surf through them and eventually remember it only if they watch it often enough. For those with a lot of channels, they have a piece of cardboard that lists them, and they look through it for a couple of minutes every time until they eventually remember. This works for 20 channels, or even 50. It does not work for 30 million channels. On the other hand, if my TV let me type in "CNN" and it came back with the right channel, that would scale beautifully as long as nobody else was dumb enough to name their channel CNN.
On the other hand, if my TV let me type in "CNN" and it came back with the right channel, that would scale beautifully as long as nobody else was dumb enough to name their channel CNN.
Or dumb enough to name it IBM...Therein lies part of the problem.
On the other hand, if my TV let me type in "CNN" and it came back with the right channel, that would scale beautifully as long as nobody else was dumb enough to name their channel CNN.
And if there's CNN 1, CNN 2, CNN 3? Or CNN Airport, CNN Europe, CNN Latin America..... Of course, that's as likely to happen as there being more than one Showtime!! -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 02:51:30PM -0800, bob bownes wrote:
On the other hand, if my TV let me type in "CNN" and it came back with the right channel, that would scale beautifully as long as nobody else was dumb enough to name their channel CNN.
Or dumb enough to name it IBM...Therein lies part of the problem.
I don't see that it's a problem. First-come first-served worked fine until the courts got involved.
On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Shawn McMahon wrote:
I don't see that it's a problem. First-come first-served worked fine until the courts got involved.
Didn't work _that_ fine either. In the .nl. domain rush of last year, I have witnessed at least a dozen cases of two people applying for the same domainname at the same time with a different provider and things getting hairy in a legal manner (the loser by first-come-first-served will try to blame his ISP for not acting quicker, implicate conspiracies between ISPs and the winning party, etc. etc.) I'd say do away with DNS, let's go back to a voluntary HOSTS.TXT. It's either that or Active Directory Hell. Pi
On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 12:40:55AM +0100, Pim van Riezen wrote:
I'd say do away with DNS, let's go back to a voluntary HOSTS.TXT. It's either that or Active Directory Hell.
Or stay with what we have. Why is that not a valid option? HOSTS.TXT certainly isn't, and a single-platform solution certainly isn't.
More precisely, the courts started getting involved as soon as first-come-first-serve stopped working fine. -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Shawn McMahon Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2001 3:16 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Namespace conflicts On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 02:51:30PM -0800, bob bownes wrote:
On the other hand, if my TV let me type in "CNN" and it came back with the right channel, that would scale beautifully as long as nobody else was dumb enough to name their channel CNN.
Or dumb enough to name it IBM...Therein lies part of the problem.
I don't see that it's a problem. First-come first-served worked fine until the courts got involved.
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 05:27:20PM -0800, Tony Hain wrote:
More precisely, the courts started getting involved as soon as first-come-first-serve stopped working fine.
No, someone involved the courts when they were second, and the courts didn't understand so they didn't smack it back at the lawyers "dismissed with prejudice". DNS didn't make the mess, the courts did.
participants (9)
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Ben Browning -
bob bownes -
David Charlap -
David Lesher -
Pim van Riezen -
Shawn McMahon -
Steve Sobol -
Tony Hain -
Vadim Antonov