Paul Mockapetris On The Future of DNS

penciling_in writes "In a CircleID article called Letting DNS Loose, Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of DNS and Chief Scientist and Chairman of Nominum, gives a good indication of what is to be expected in the upcoming years when it comes to data riding on DNS: "RFID tags, UPC codes, International characters in email addresses and host names, and a variety of other identifiers could all go into DNS, and folks have occasionally proposed doing just that. It's really just a question of figuring out how to use the DNS -- it's ready to carry arbitrary identifiers." According to Paul, there are 40 or so data types to be added to DNS: "In fact the whole ENUM scheme is built out of classical DNS technology, and NAPTR is really just the latest data type to be added to the DNS. NAPTR is also just an extension of SRV, which was an extension of MX, which are DNS data types that Active Directory uses to start itself and the Internet uses to route each piece of mail." Paul also clarifies the recent BBC story previously discussed here on Slashdot."

Verisign's Sitefinder

[thedillybar]

All the more reason to make sure this "Sitefinder" service gets shutdown.

Who knows what Verisign will do when someone scans an "unregistered" barcode...

security?

[MrSpiff]

what about security issues? BIND has as long history of bugs and with the recent threats to the root DNS servers, I think the real issue is building a secure DNS service rather than extending the data it carries.

It's the politics, not the technology

[BritGeek]

While the main point of the article is interesting, the rather depressing part - about the politics of the ITU, ICANN, etc. - is that unless we can get these oafs to work together, we are totally hosed. Having witnessed some of the machinations that goes on in at least a couple of these groups, I despair of whether we will get anything rational out of all of this. (I would much, much rather see sausages being made, than see these groups "working' again...)

Too complicated, I don't think so

[bigberk]

Give me a break. DNS itself is virtually unchanged over all these years. You've pretty much got SOA, NS, A, CNAME, and MX records and some other record types for meta information. RFID? Active Directory? Ppphtt.

Re:More Basic DNS issues need to be resolved

[cbreaker]

Naa, without checks and balances, which is not what the internet is based upon, all the porn sites would simply mark themselves as "news" or "games" or "shopping."

Re:WEB/FTP

[MavEtJu]

I'm surprised there aren't records for 'WEB' and 'FTP' and the like.

There are three ways this has been resolved in the past and today:

- portmapper, where you ask the machine (think of it as a DNS on the machine itself for port-numbers) on which port the nfsd listens.

- hostnames: ftp.freebsd.org is the ftp-server, www.freebsd.org is the www-server. Yes, still port 21 and 80, but you can figure out which hosts to use for which protocol.

- SRV records, which you ask for a service and a domain name: _smtp._tcp.mavetju.org resolves into:
_smtp._tcp.mavetju.org. : 0 0 25 tim.barnet.com.au. (try dig _smtp._tcp.mavetju.org SRV)

So as you see, the possibilities are there, now it is the applications which have to figure out how to use it.

Edwin

Re:mDNS & Rendezvous?

[Kent Recal]

It does indeed sound pretty neat.
I wonder whether the additional load due to the broadcasting could become an issue on large installations. Also I'm curious whether it can somehow work across switched segments (if you want to discover hosts in a neighbour net).

While I doubt (correct me if I'm wrong..) that the broadcast mechanism could scale enough to replace old fashioned DNS it's still a nice substitute for DHCP at least.

And it definately makes some nice playground for the p2p hackers. If you can get the auto-discovery feature basically by linking a lib and adding some syscalls then I bet we will soon see a lot of utility apps learn how to find and talk to each other over the wire.

Can't wait for the xscreensaver plugin that connects to all other xscreensavers around and uh.. launches a sproingies contest.

Re:naming conventions

[Malcontent]

There is no reason to limit TLDs to just a handful. It's just artificial scarcity.

We should have thousands of TLDs. In fact every domain name should be a TLD. You should go to business.exxon not exxon.com.

International characters - consequences?

[thona]

::International characters in email addresses BAD idea. VERY bad idea. I can really see an american struggling over his english keyboard enting a norwegian char to send an email to his norgwegian partner. Funny (with me being in german) That said, for me it is NOT that funny anymore (being in german) when I have to figure out a way to enter a chinese char into a chinese email address given that I have no clue about how their char system works at all. PLEASE spare us international chars in emails and wbsite domains.