Subject: Re: Emotions, Encoding, and Ignorance (Was: Why not XML)

From: Luis Bruno <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 21:40:41 +0100

James Webster wrote privately *and* to the list, but misplaced an 'f'; I
won't be snipping much, to save him the trouble of resending. Comments
are inline.

To: [email-masked]

James Webster wrote:
> Luis Bruno wrote:
> > they can't query for a new RR type when behind an ISA firewall.
> 
> I don't believe that the issue is ISA, but rather that the Microsoft DNS
> server isn't able to support new RR types, and they don't plan to do so in
> the next 5 year OS development cycle.
> 
> The ISA rpc issue that was mentioned was a limitation with the ISA Client.
> I would not expect that any sane administrator would install an ISA client
> on an internet facing box. ISA support port mapping, and as such has no
> issues with pointing to a DNS server that supports new RR types.

I was assuming that a MTA might want to query for MARID info, even behind an
ISA server. So either I've misunderstood your points, or Jim Lyon's in:
http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/msg01822.html

From what I understood of Jim Lyon's message, if you protect your MTA with
ISA it can't reach out and fetch unknown-to-ISA records.

BTW, my knowledge of Microsoft's products is at user-level.

> That said, I suspect there would be MS job security issues with suggesting
> that a Microsoft customer use a non-Microsoft product because of
> deficiencies in the Microsoft product.

There's an implicit corollary to "Don't fix what ain't broke.". Job security
isn't a valid argument here.

> > That's the "clean" approach. However, I don't know how hard that is for
> > the sysadmins. The MTA must be upgraded, that's a given. Would upgrading
> > DNS be a showstopper?
> 
> I suspect the requirements of deploying both MTA and DNS upgrades would be a
> showstopper to organizations that have different administrators for Mail and
> DNS.

I was thinking about cost of upgrading *lots* of DNS servers; could you give
an example? The one you provided seemed to go around politics; I'd appreciate
if you could explain a bit more.

> > You should be able to put structured, binary data in TXT anyway; that's
> > how I read the RFC, anyway.
> 
> If you are going to use structured binary data, then this should be a new RR
> type. There are bound to be more then a few DNS servers that do not support
> this. So once again its the RR/TXT argument.

I've not tested serving random binary data with TXT. However, as I read the
RFC, TXT records contain a string of arbitrary bytes.

> Short term (0-5 years) TXT provides a method to quickly deploy a solution.
> SPF/XML doesn't really matter since within that time period the vast
> majority of the DNS reponses will be no record found.  As such the short
> term solution should be concerned less with performance and more with ease
> of deployment.
> 
> Long term (5+ years) there needs to be a solution that is small and fast,
> thus a new binary RR record.  It is also likely that any solution will
> include deployment tools that can convert records from the short term
> solution to a long term solution record.
> 
> Arguing over the details of the short term solution only moves the
> deployment of both solutions out without solving the problem.  Making sure
> the long term solution is designed correctly is far more important.

Thanks for your time, everyone.

-- 
Luis Bruno                                UTM: 29T 629481E 4511776N 576m
"14) Always remember that Windows NT administration is to Unix and WAN
administration, as _Herbie The Love Bug_ is to _Citizen Kane_. Respect
your elders and don't trivialize their work." -- Christian Wagner's Tips