I'm going to start a company and introduce a new TLD.
.sucks.
I wonder what ICANN would have to say about that.
I'll register icann.sucks
I'll register DNS.sucks
The whole idea of unique human-readable names is broken (I would go as far
as to say that the idea of any global name space is silly Note that
the "address space" and "name space" are different because addresses
cannot be arbitrarily allocated, and therefore cannot be contentious.
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"
--vadim
PS I know, I know, it is politically impossible to abolish DNS
wholesale. Any progress is politically impossible.
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)
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
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
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.
I'll register DNS.sucks
The whole idea of unique human-readable names is broken (I would go as far
as to say that the idea of any global name space is silly
It shouldn't be. The great mistake with DNS was allowing a hierarchical
network engineering convenience to *become* a flat namespace used as a
globally-unique identifier for bodies of data.
Historically we could pin this on a) the formulation and standardisation
of the URL and b) the existence of gTLDs.
A better method for addressing data would be based on source-brokered,
signed, distributed caches of keywords that can be search and, more
importantly, bookmarked in the context of each signer.
Thus removing the visibility of the server domain and eliminating the
fistfights over the abused body of the gTLD namespace, relegated DNS to
where it belongs - a name-to-IP-address mapping.
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"
A similar suggestion, I think - but turn it around so that sites are
self-brokered. Portal sites then become indexers of indices. The search
engines are, in a way, creators of meta-data.
PS I know, I know, it is politically impossible to abolish DNS
wholesale. Any progress is politically impossible.
Nothing is politically impossible. The days of neutral community
innovation are not over. If you say it over and over again, you can even
believe it.
We raised and developed these ideas at the last RIPE meeting with a few
colleagues & friends (under the pretext, yes, of "DNS Sucks"). I think the
concepts are sound but acceptance is hard; one can't accomplish this with
a proprietary, licensed, patented product.
- Joshua
-[ Joshua Goodall ]-----------------------------------------------
-[ Chief Systems Architect, IP R&D ]----- Cook, Geek, Lover ------
-[ joshuag@interxion.com ]--------------- joshua@roughtrade.net --
WARNING: This post contains heavy snippage and tongue-in-cheek footnotes.
Build a search engine which takes "old" domain name "WWW.CNN.COM" and
produces URL with 207.25.71.27 in it
Great. Now I just have to remember the IP address of my favorite search engine. Why don't we simplify it and just remember
Even better, go to a real search engine and look for "CNN news US
edition".
I spent a year in the bowels of search engine placement. I can tell you that if there's a resource I am going to use repeatedly, on multiple OSes, multiple machines, and across any length of time, I don't want to find out my favorite search engine purged it's record. Nor do I want to find out it has renumbered, and the search engine has the bad data cached. At least DNS zones have TTL's. No, that won't happen to the big traffic sites, but it sure will happen to the smaller ones. Not only that, but you are swapping apples for oranges here; I don't have to remember "cnn.com", but I have to remember "cnn news us edition"?
Not only does this break economical and easy redundancy, it breaks virtual webhosting as well. *That* will certainly be a nice kidney punch to the ailing IPv4 address space. "Excuse me, Arin? Hi. I need a /20."[1]
I'm wondering how people managed to find CNN on TV -- after
all, CNN ads didn't feature local channel numbers
On cable TV, you have ~200 channels. On the internet, you have 4 billion IP addresses. The analogy doesn't scale.
Not to mention the fact that you have a channel guide that serves the same function as DNS.
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.
I see those OSes *all* the time.
Hell, I've seen more copies of Ed Woods "Plan 9 From Outer Space" than I have Plan 9.
What you are suggesting is that we remove a universally implemented long-held industry standard and replace it with the equivalent of a lot of kludgy proprietary hacks- which is what DNS was invented to escape from. IMO, this is an astoundingly bad idea. The system as it stands is fault tolerant, distributed, universal[2], and easy. You want to replace it with something that is more susceptible to human error, more likely to break during network renumbering[4], more expensive in both time and money, more wasteful of dwindling IP space, and less functional overall?
When your car gets a few scratches on the hood, do you junk it and walk everywhere?
> 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"Find us at AOL keyword 'CNN'".
...at which point AOL Keywords will become even more spammed than domain names, and more broken than DNS.
Please, explain to me how DNS differs from any other resource location
(or perhaps "association") system? Examples that immediately spring to mind:- Address books
- URL Bookmarks
- Altavista
- Google "ad words"
- dmoz.org
- doubleclick.net banners
All of these currently point to a distributed, authoritative resource system. They cannot be relied upon to be authoritative in and of themselves. I have seen pages on Altavista, for example, that have been defunct for *over a year* and they are stiull listed. Despite numerous attempts to get them unlisted.
- LDAP
"Unlike existing database systems, LDAP is not designed to hold many hundreds of thousands of entries. It might be best to think of LDAP as a hierarchically organized lightweight database. An LDAP server may use a small embedded database to contain its information for faster access, but it's nothing like the large commercial databases such as Oracle, Sybase, DB/2 or SQL Server. "
http://linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-07/lw-07-ldap_1.html
- AOL keywords
No real difference, aside from having 1/3 the amount of address space that the Big Three TLD's have. Then again, do we really want to standardize on an AOL product that remains wholely under their thumb?
- ARIN allocations
...and apnic, and ripe. Aside from a layer or two on the ol' OSI model?
- akamai
Difference? Explain the similarity?
- BGP updates
My router automagically remembers ASN's it talks to. I have a phone book for a reason.
Some, you can register with for free. Some, you have to pay for. All act as
means to locate resources (URLs, email addresses, etc). The proliferation of
these is, IMHO, an indictment of DNS as a resource locator; obviously, it
isn't usable or general enough to serve the needs of today's Internet, or it
(and its implementors) would have kept up.
A Swiss army knife with a hammer attached to it will never equal a true hammer. The only thing that even comes close to DNS in terms of the niche it fills is the AOL keywords thing, and even that already uses DNS as a backend.
Bottom line:
Just because it ain't perfect don't mean it ain't the best solution.
~Ben, as always, speaking for himself
[1] Which, I believe, is a very special level of Hell reserved for people like Hitler, Stalin, and Barney the Dinosaur
[2] Although I do agree that unicode support would be nice.[3]
[3] Man, the skr1pt k1dd13z domains would go nutso with that one
[4] This is the floor right above the one referenced in [1]
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
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.
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
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.
Joshua Goodall <joshua@roughtrade.net> writes:
[ ... ]
A better method for addressing data would be based on source-brokered,
signed, distributed caches of keywords that can be search and, more
importantly, bookmarked in the context of each signer.
I'm not sure I want something that elaborate to ftp a file from my
laptop to my desktop. And I certainly don't want to have to remember
IP addresses for both of them.
I think DNS works pretty well. You just have to think of it like an
800 number --- 800 numbers are ambiguous (1-800-CONTACTS could provide
information about how to contact people, information about aliens
contacting the earth, or information about the old PBS show 3-2-1
Contact!, but it in fact sells contact lenses), but they're still
easier to remember than the digits.
------ScottG.
More precisely, the courts started getting involved as soon as
first-come-first-serve stopped working fine.
Interesting analogy...How many here are old enough to remember when (in
the US) the first two digits of the exchange meant something?
617-GArden8-xxxx was the houses in/around the garden section of town
long ago & far away...
But we've drifted well off operational topic.
Scott Gifford wrote:
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.