Document: draft-warnicke-network-dns-resolution-05.txt
From: Suzanne Woolf 
Date: 2 februari 2005

Document: draft-warnicke-network-dns-resolution-05.txt
Title: "A Suggested Scheme for DNS Resolution of Networks and Gateways"
Intended Status: listed as informational, see below
Reviewer: Suzanne Woolf
Review Date: 1 February 2004
Submitted through RFC-editor

The draft is listed in the agenda as "informational". As written, it
may be intended as "BCP". But there are no usage notes revealing the
intention.

The draft discusses a mechanism for using specially-formed chains of
PTR records to publish the names and IP addresses of the first-hop
router for a given IP address, and (implicitly) the netmask. The
mechanism is not too dissimilar to that used for subdelegating
responsibility for PTR records in prefix delegations longer than /24
(RFC 2317).

At first reading, this strikes me as the sort of use of the DNS often
proposed by people who think the DNS is a more sophisticated and
robust database mechanism than it is. Such schemes tend to be harmless
if people decide they're merely useless, but often they don't scale
very well if people do like them. There are also may be implementation
pitfalls that can generate lots of new queries on the infrastructure.

I suggest this draft be reviewed by DNSOP, if only to add usage and
implementation notes suggesting the limitations or hazards of the
proposed approach. There are no protocol issues I can see so it's out
of scope for DNSEXT.