Re: Radical Surgery proposal: stop doing reverse for IPv6.

[Dean Anderson <dean@av8.com>]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Edward Lewis wrote:

> This thread is a strong symptom of the (appearance of the) IETF
> degenerating into a debating society.  It's not the topic, it's the
> path of the discussion.

I think this is offtopic, but I'll say something on it anyway. Of course
the IETF is a "debating society", in the sense that technical issues are
debated, and decisions are reached democratically.

> Whether or not reverse for IPv6 is done is not the real question.

I think it is the real question. In the last discussion (on namedroppers),
it was explained why reverse DNS serves no useful purpose, and has the
harmful side-effect that many administrators place unfounded trust in it.
At best, reverse is an untrustable convenience function, with a harmful
side-effect.

One can assume the response for reverse dns is of the form
"h-octet-octet-octet-octet.assignee.in-addr.arpa", and similar for IPv6.
Since it is always this form, there is no need to actually do the query.
Millions or billions of unnecessary records (and unnecessary queries) are
stored to find comparatively infrequently accessed information. Anyone who
really desires to find the assignee, can query the address registry.

It makes sense to deprecate reverse lookup for IPv4 (its already
optional), and eliminate it for IPv6.

		--Dean

>
> The real questions are:
>
> 1) Will $<approach> for doing IPv6 reverse work?
>
> 2) If there are multiple positive answers to the above, do we need to
> find a best approach and/or what set of approaches having positive
> answers are interoperable?
>
> 3) If there is no positive answer to the above, is there a compelling
> need to continue searching for an approach that will work?
>
> So -
>       of the approaches proposed to date, which ones 'work'?
>
> And -
>       does anyone want to make the compelling case we need despite the
>       fact that there is apparently no 'working' approaches?  (Is so,
>       this is input to the draft cited earlier in the thread.)
>
> PS - I think it would be unwise to explicitly write off any effort in
> any context.  I can understand allocating no resources to an effort
> (effectively killing it via starvation) or ignoring an effort
> (banishing it).  But I don't see a reason to declare that no one
> shall continue to work on (the royal) 'it'.
>
> Perhaps this is a reaction to an unintended interpretation of the
> wording of the proposal.
>
> --
> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
> Edward Lewis                                          +1-703-227-9854
> ARIN Research Engineer
>
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