Re: (ngtrans) Joint DNSEXT & NGTRANS summary

[Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU>]

    Date:        Tue, 14 Aug 2001 07:16:37 -0700 (PDT)
    From:        Bill Manning <bmanning@ISI.EDU>
    Message-ID:  <200108141416.f7EEGbY03659@zed.isi.edu>

  | 	Hogwash.  EGP -> BGP
  | 		  RIP -> ISIS/OSPF
  | 		  MB/MG -> MX
  | 
  | 	All upgrades. Works a treat.  

Hogwash.

I'm not exterior routing expert, but aren't EGP/BGP etc, essentially
bilateral relationships?   That is, as long as two peers agree on
what they use, no-one else really cares.   I'm sure the conversion
(so long ago I bet many people here don't recall EGP) wasn't quite
this easy, but it still doesn't involve unrelated paries all deciding
that it is time to start doing something different.

Interior routing protocols are something within the confines of one
organisation, and aren't even vaguelly similar.

The last one is the closest, except that MB/MG were never deployed,
and even now, mailers still fall back to using A records when there
is no MX record (that is, we have no way of indicating "no mail for
that domain" which is what we would have had had MX been deployed
from the start).  This is the closest example, and it is one that
illustrates that upgrades don't really work (even after the 12 years
since MX was defined, or whatever it is (longer I think)).

The only contemporary upgrade that is anything like what changing AAAA
to A6 would be, after serious AAAA deployment and use is the conversion
to IPv6 from IPv4.   Even with all the support it has, that one is not
yet certain to actually complete (things are looking good, but it isn't
certain by any means).   And that's with the motivation behind it that
IPv4 simply cannot cope with the net of the future, no matter what frills
are added around the edges (2^32 isn't enough to give one address to
everyone who needs one).

  | 	we can do the following:
  | 
  | 	a) move one proposal somewhere else on the standards track

You actually mean off the standards track.

  | 	Because I beleive that A6 has enough potential, I'm willing 
  | 	to have it move to experimental, giving developers and
  | 	operators more time to understand its impact.  I think that
  | 	long term, its benefits will overshadow AAAA and that a
  | 	migration plan can be deployed.

No, assuming you're right, long term what will happen is that people
will lament that the wrong decision was made in 2001, but regret that
there's no way to transition any more, the combination of resolvers
doing only AAAA lookups, and servers providing only AAAA records, means
there's no clean way to get out from under (sure, servers could provide
A6 records as well, but they'll have to keep providing AAAA records
forever to keep the old resolvers happy, and resolvers could do A6 lookups
but they'd have to fall back on doing AAAA so they can find names that
are only available that way - given that AAAA would have to remain, and
resolvers would have to do lookups of it, just for practical reasons,
there's no way to actually transition to A6).

kre