Subject: Re: DNSEXT WGLC Summary: LLMNR

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 21:07:02 +0700

Date:        Fri, 24 Oct 2003 00:49:37 -0500
    From:        Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | Only if there is no tedlemon.example.net.   If there is one, it will 
  | get the wrong answer.   This is because there is no way to say "I mean 
  | LLMNR."   I can't say "ping tedlemon.llmnr" - all I can do is say "ping 
  | tedlemon", which is ambiguous.

What happened to "ping tedlemon." ?

If the names are actually different, then there's never going to be a problem.

If the names are the same, then there's nothing rational that can be done.
The ambiguity exists, the very best that can be done is to at least provide
a well defined reconciliation rule.

Appending a constant to a name and hoping to improve things is essentially the
same as adding a constant to a pseudo-random number and hoping to improve it.

If you want your local-only system to have a name that cannot possibly be 
confused with a DNS name, giving it a name in a fake TLD (like llmnr or local)
will work just fine to allow you to reach that one safely by name (assuming
there isn't another one on the LAN of course).

Attempting to do this automatically simply doesn't help - that is, if you
expect the system to be known as "tedlemon" and you believe that by doing the
LLMNR lookup using "tedlemon.llmnr" automatically (and the node making itself
known there that way automatically) then you're mistaken.

The user still does "ping tedlemon" and gets an answer - from the "other"
host with the same name - there's no indication that it isn't the one that
was wanted.

There's unquestionably a difficult naming issue here - applications want to
"simply work" - that is, use a standard API to translate name->address, and
be able to use the address with some kind of confidence.   Having that able
to work in a mixed environment of registered names, and "made up" names is
really not easy.   Appletalk provides no guidance, as it never had an 
environment like this to work in.   The various attempts to solve this by
fiddling with bits in the lookup format are sadly misguided (and adding a
constant string to the name being sought is just fiddling with bits in the
packet format).

kre

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---

From: Joshua Graessley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 11:47:13 -0700

My apologies to the working group for wasting their time. It is 
apparent I am in the minority here. It seems the worry of conflicting 
with a name in DNS and being unable to use LLMNR is not an important 
issue to most folks. This is reflected in the draft. It is also quite 
apparent that LLMNR and mDNS solve completely different problems.

LLMNR does not appear to solve any problems important to me or the 
vendor I work for. Maybe this working group will have luck finding 
someone that is interested in LLMNR.

Best wishes,
good luck!

-josh