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

From: "J. Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 17:00:14 -0400

> From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

    >> You appear to be saying that because historically people screwed up
    >> configuring their DNS that it is impossible to rely on the DNS for
    >> critical infrastructure.

    > I wouldn't say 'impossible'. My point is that it is more difficult to
    > get this to work well than it might seem at first glance. ... and note
    > that even if you fix the reliability problems associated with using DNS
    > to do mapping from global endpoint IDs to local routing information,
    > you still have the performance problems to deal with.

Are you making the assumption that we can grow the network in size (let's not
even get into functionality) *without* adding extra architecture/mechanism?

In other words, is your problem with DNS as currently designed/implemented/
maintained - or is it more (as I seem to recall from previous messages from
you) with the general notion that more complex things are fundamentally bad
(since any extra mechanism is also a place for something to go wrong, or a
place to incur overhead)?

If so, I'd say that's false economy - to paraphrase Lincoln on leg length, a
network of a certain size and functionality neeeds a certain amount of
complexity, and if you fail to architect it in (i.e. cleanly), it will get
added around the edges in all sorts of ugly warts (i.e. the kind the Internet
stack is currently infested with).

	Noel

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 09:54:08 -0400

> even get into functionality) *without* adding extra architecture/mechanism?

no, it's fairly clear to me that we either constrain how people connect
their networks together, or we have to change the mechanism by which we 
propagate and/or compute routes (what kind of changes, or how to deploy
them, are not clear), if we want to make the network considerably larger. 

my general point is not that additional complexity is always bad - but if 
you're going to add a lot of complexity you should get a better system as a 
result.  and a system that doesn't meet the needs of applications is 
not clearly better. 

and the specific point is that folks who are thinking "just use DNS
or something like it" probably haven't looked at this in enough
detail, and/or they have a oversimplified view of applications' needs.

Keith