Re: SRV records - when?

[Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com>]

At 02:21 PM 2/14/02, Mats Dufberg wrote:
>On Feb 14, 2002, 11:29 (-0500) Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com> wrote:
>
> > For sites where some parts are encrypted, and other parts are not, there's
> > a real need to keep the client/server mappings together. Consider, for
> > example, a site which does not use encryption for the shopping cart, but
> > does for the checkout. If the SRV records are used to select among servers
> > in different physical locations, it would be quite inconvenient for an
> > https SRV record to point at a different locale than the http record.
>
>Do you mean that we should have the same SRV record for http and https?

I'm saying that may be more useful than having separate ones, yes. This is 
due to the way the service employs the ports.

>The SRV record contains information on port number, but we need to have
>different ports for http and https. My conclusion is that we have to have
>different SRV records for http and https. Or we could say that we think
>that https should not be, and only support http.

I guess the basic question is whether having SRV records tied to a 1:1 
mapping of port numbers is desirable, or whether they should be mapped 
instead to "services." There are cases, such as the present case of HTTP 
and HTTPS where the "service" described as the "World Wide Web" uses more 
than one port. To properly point to a particular host to provide service, 
it doesn't seem useful to do this based on port number.

So, the question is should there be a "web" SRV record that can be queried 
and which clients use to answer the larger service question, instead of 
finding out about the HTTP port or the HTTPS port.

Dan

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel Senie                                        dts@senie.com
Amaranth Networks Inc.                    http://www.amaranth.com