Subject: Re: draft-ietf-dnsext-axfr-clarify-05.txt

From: Bruce Campbell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 11:22:06 +0100 (CET)

On 10 Dec 2002, D. J. Bernstein wrote:

> Paul Vixie writes:
> > A zone's identity is what the primary master says it is.
>
> Nonsense. For example, I've seen a zone that was set up with
>
>    * a European server that returns some European addresses and
>    * a United States server that returns some United States addresses
>
> in an effort to reduce delays for users. (Of course, as I discussed in a
> previous message, clients are under no obligation to keep track of this
> difference.) There is no ``primary master'' for this zone. Your notion
> of ``zone identity'' is simply confused.

Thats simply a different point of view for the clients, thus modifying the
statement (to deal with non-orthodox configurations as above) to:

	``A zone's identity is what the primary master for that particular
	  view says it is.''

For most zones, there is a single view (global), and thus a single primary
master.  For other zones, there would be multiple 'primary' masters, quite
likely based on network topology.

( Although it seems that implementations of topology-based DNS tricks use
  something akin to the BIND 'views' facility to have every nameserver for
  that zone return the 'nearest' results for a given client.  Such are
  outside the general scope of transferring zones )

> As for your comments about the BIND 9-specific model of DNS being
> ``right'' while everybody else is ``wrong'': Do you seriously believe
> that this religious nonsense justifies imposing massive redeployment
> costs upon innocent users? If you want a new protocol, deploy a new
> protocol; there is absolutely no reason to break compatibility.

Which specific 'massive' deployment costs?  After all, someone who works
for the BIND Company (as you put it) has explicitly stated that pre and
post clarification servers will be able to interoperate, ie:

In [email-masked], Mark Andrews states:

:        Note there are no *forced* upgrades happening here.  The pre-clarify
:        servers will interoperate with the post-clarify servers.  However
:        the post-clarify servers can be used in configurations where most
:        of the pre-clarify servers (those that merge data) can't.

I daresay that your axfr client (unpatched) will be able to successfully
retrieve zones from a post-clarify server, and that a post-clarify client
will be able to successfully retrieve zones from your axfr master (patched
for returning the appropriate rcode and id).

( I'm taking the above two from http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/axfr-clarify.html,
  which only gives detailed comments up to revision -02 of the draft )

--==--
Bruce.

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