Of imminent interest to the operations community....
FYI,
- ferg
The IAB is ready to ask the RFC-Editor to publish
What's in a Name: False Assumptions about DNS Names
draft-iab-dns-assumptions-02
as an Informational RFC. This document reviews the potential
assumptions that may be made based on domain names, as well
as the potential implications (and pitfalls) of those assumptions.
The IAB solicits comments by March 29, 2005. Please send
comments to the IAB (iab@iab.org), or to ietf@ietf.org.
The document can be found at
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-dns-assumptions-02.txt
From the Abstract:
The Domain Name System (DNS) provides an essential service on the
Internet, mapping structured names to a variety of data, usually IP
addresses. These names appear in email addresses, URIs, and other
application layer identifiers that are often rendered to human users.
Because of this, there has been a strong demand to acquire names that
have significance to people, through equivalence to registered
trademarks, company names, types of services, and so on. A danger of
this trend is that the humans and automata which consume and use
these identifiers will make assumptions about the services that are
or should be provided by the hosts associated with these identifiers.
This document discusses this problem in more detail and makes
recommendations on how it can be avoided.
Leslie Daigle,
For the IAB.