[IP] more on Beyond the DNS
Begin forwarded message:
From: Steven Champeon <schampeo@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 2, 2005 9:44:33 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Tobin Maginnis <ptm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Beyond the DNS
on Sun, Oct 02, 2005 at 06:24:03AM -0400, David Farber wrote:
From: Tobin Maginnis <ptm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 1, 2005 10:25:56 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Beyond the DNS
Hi Dave, [For IP if you wish...]
I have enjoyed the fascinating discussion on DNS, but there seems to
be several small points that were either implied or assumed which I
think could be developed more fully.
One point is the nature of DNS as a parallel entity to networking. In
a way, it's similar to how the lymphatic system relates to the
circulatory system. The lymphatic system helps identify infectious
agents, but it's the circulatory system that does the real work in
fighting pathology.
As indicated in an earlier discussion, Domain Name Service (DNS) is
implemented with nothing more than a series of hierarchical files
that lead to a name (URL prefix) and IP address pair. The actual data
transfer in the Internet (including DNS lookup) is carried out
through TCP/DGP and IP exchanges.
There's a lot more to DNS than "what IP does this name have?" For
instance, it also answers questions like "who do I ask about this
domain?" or "where do I send email to this address?" or "with what key
do I encrypt subsequent traffic" or "is this email sender authentic".
DNS is about a lot more than you seem to give it credit for. It's sad
to see such a powerful system referred to a a "URL prefix", which
apparently confuses the Web for the entire Internet, common among those
who don't know anything about the Internet but a dangerous mistake for
anyone trying to understand the furor over Internet governance.
A second point is that internet access is really a search problem as
opposed to a name identification problem. Said another way, Google
would probably be just as effective search engine as it is today if
it simply searched the IP address space (without using URLs) on port
80 and noted all the resulting web page information.
This ignores the widespread use of name-based virtual hosting, which
makes such IP-based queries/indexing nearly useless. We host several
dozen sites on our servers (using most of a /27) but you'd never know
it from connecting to the IP alone, as they're almost all configured
to only answer to the name.
Steve
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