Re: Anti Capitalism?

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Up kind of late, eh, Rick? :-)

Rick H. Wesson allegedly said:
> 
[...]
> > I agree that the repository shouldn't contain whois data.
> 
> Having the back end regestry support whois is trival, because all the
> data is there. All that info from the applications make up the data
> contained in the whois server. WHOIS is a public interface to the
> metadata contained within the backend regestry.
> 
> It is useful and important, if it were not then the whois queries
> on the internics whois database would be negliagble. In august of '96
> there were over 10 million queries to the server WHOIS.INTERNIC.NET

That's an average of about 4 a second, with peaks much higher than 
that. 

All the more reason it should be distributed and not located in a 
central server.

And it would even better if it were located in a caching distributed 
service like DNS...

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnlFrom owner-iahc-discuss  Fri Jan  3 08:00:16 1997
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References: <v03007807aef274ac5a07@[204.250.49.20]> from "Simon Higgs"
 at Jan 3, 97 00:54:10 am
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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 1997 04:04:03 -0800
To: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
From: Simon Higgs <simon@higgs.com>
Subject: Re: Anti Capitalism?
Cc: kent@songbird.com, davidk@ISI.EDU, perry@piermont.com,
        iahc-discuss@iahc.org
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At 3:14 AM -0800 1/3/97, Kent Crispin wrote:

> Simon Higgs allegedly said:
> >
> > At 12:55 AM -0800 1/3/97, Kent Crispin wrote:
> [...]
> > > This works fine.  It's easy to add the data to DNS (just a mechanical
> > > edit of a zone database file), and it's just a tiny bit of
> > > already-written code to extract it.
> >
> > How do you reverse map the contact or registrar information from DNS?
>
> Actually, I wouldn't.  Putting the data in DNS is to support one
> purpose:  finding a person to fix a problem when DNS doesn't work.
> As a privacy advocate, I see no reason to facilitate people finding
> every system I might be the contact for, for example.  Or is that
> what you meant by a "reverse map"?
>

That means there'll be DNS crawlers. And everyone was wigging out last
year over the existing load... 8-(

Actually, the most useful feature would be geographic mapping within
DNS for any host record. It's a feature request (GPS-DNS anyone?  ;).
The other stuff is usefull from a white pages perspective.

> [...]
> > > If the data is in DNS the central service doesn't have to do anything at
> > > all to support whois.
> >
> > I'm not convinced. You have no search mechanism for anything other than
> > IP or domain names. How do you reverse map the other fields in DNS? You
> > can do this in whois, but not in DNS.
>
> As I said, it is my belief that the only legitimate purpose for
> contact data is problem resolution.  But once it is in DNS it is easy
> to build another database from it, unfortunately:
>
> Dump the zone, grep for TXT fields with the appropriate headers (eg
> "Contact-id: KC125", and build a database from it.  This was Paul
> Vixie's idea about how to support a white-pages directory service.
> He imagined several competing directory service organizations doing
> it.
>

I still don't see why this couldn't be built into DNS. It's no
different from creating in-addr.arpa records. You just need to ensure
the hierarchy is built properly to support it (ObjectDNS anyone? ;).

Regards,

Simon

--
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.