Subject: [p2p-sip] Fwd: what's wrong with DNS?

From: matthew at matthew.at (Matthew Kaufman)
Date: Sat, 2 Dec 2006 23:07:05 -0800

Adrian Georgescu:
>
> The DNS can solve only the address resolution of the non-NAT-ed peer.  
> One needs
> more than dynamic DNS to merge a self-organizing network with SIP
> functionality. No DNS server will be able to do parallel and serial
> forking, aggregate presence information, NAT traversal, buddy list
> synchronization among devices, redirect for not online to name a few
> things one needs in the day-to-day communications. DNS is good for
> bootstrap and and for providing global addressable URIs.

No DHT-based lookup mechanism does all those things either.

Those are all interesting problems that need solving that are independent of
the "how do we look up information that we don't have" problem. 

Interestingly, for things like "certificates" and "IP addresses", DNS
provides a convenient protocol for this *and*, if the answers given to
certain queries (like "what's an IP address of a thing that can act as a
proxy service for this domain") are compatible, allow for direct
interoperability with non-P2P SIP callers.

Building a thing that answers DNS queries out of a large number of nodes
that communicate using a DHT? That's certainly an option that some domains
might want to pursue, but I think it is silly to mandate a DHT all the way
down to the clients when there's (administrative) domains that might wish to
operate in other ways.

Matthew Kaufman
matthew at matthew.at