Subject: RE: draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

From: "BookIII, Robert" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 10:52:06 -0400

This may be a divergence from the topic, so I'll apologize in advance, but
Vernon's point about bounced emails struck a cord with me. I made the
mistake of leaving a couple of options on my MS Outlook which causes a
receipt to be sent back to me when an email is delivered and when it's read.
At this point, the flurry has calmed down from my first email to the list,
save for a couple of auto-responses from NTMail in the name of
[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]> . I've been getting
repetitive delivery and read acknowledgements, which seemed to have abated
but have started up again. Does anyone know how I could go about addressing
this? Thanks for your time and consideration.

		-----Original Message-----
		From:	Vernon Schryver [mailto:[email-masked]]
		Sent:	Wednesday, April 26, 2000 10:56 PM
		To:	[email-masked]
		Subject:	Re:
draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

		> From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>

		> ...
		> There is some data indicating that Keith is right, that
there are problems in 
		> the DNS.  See, for example,
http://www.research.att.com/~edith/Papers/infocom2000.ps

		I don't think I understand the connection between that paper
about
		"Prefetching the Means for Dcoument Transfer: A New Approach
for Reducing
		Web Latency" and Keith's statement that DNS email errors are
usually on
		the receiver's side:

		] (email errors are usually detected by the sender of a
message, since
		] that's who gets the bounced message.  but the party who
has responsibility 
		] for fixing the error is usually not on the sender's end of
things)

		My perhaps irrelevant, boring, or even wrong claim was that
I'm seeing
		more sender-side than receiver-side SMTP+DNS problems.

		If the relevance of that paper is that people are have fun
and
		games with DNS to help HTTP, and that causes DNS errors that
in
		turn cause DNS problems seen by HTTP clients, then that's
consistent
		with my personal experience and my claim.  I see many crazy
		DNS failures in my personal web surfing.  (crazy either
because
		obviously silly for a very big, presumably competently run
site
		or because temporary, which says either roots are hosed or
the same
		very big, presumably competent site is crazy...have I
mentioned
		lately how frequently Akamai is not working for me?)

		I bet that the types and frequencies of DNS errors varies
with the
		application, which strikes me as a significant change from
how things used
		to be.  For example, how many SMTP servers are behind DNS
names that do
		fancy load balancing?--yes, I think I can name a very few,
but isn't the
		vast majority of SMTP load balancing and so forth based on
turning off
		the listen socket (e.g. sendmail), MX records, and non-fancy
round-robin
		RR serving?  On the extreme, every venture capital fund
seems to still be
		shoveling money at anyone who wants to try anything you'd
care to mention
		(and lots more besides) to make HTTP go faster, and many of
those schemes
		seem to involve DNS creativity.

		Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]