while reading drafts on the airplane, I have come to think that picking any specific name a la ".local" for the homenet name service is fraught with RFC1918-like confusion. For the actual printer and refridgerator (which does not move, but needs to talk to the TV) it's not a big deal, but for mobile devices, I think it's gonna lead to confusion.
When I'm at your house, and I visit "fridge.local", do I get your fridge, or mine? Assuming I want mine, if I've discovered it when I was at home, how would I bookmark and remember it, assuming it had a GUA? I therefore propose adding a level of indirection (because that solves every problem....), which (mobile) hosts will ideally become aware of. I think of this as a layer above the current LLMNR/mDNS/Bonjour++ layer. My idea is that the .homenet/.local discovery protocol would, in addition to the AAAA ULA or GUA record, would provide a reference a unique name which might not be globally resolvable from the DNS root, but can be resolved by arrangement. This would be not unlike split-horizon DNS, but given IPv6 reachability, no VPN necessary. For sites where mglt-name-delegation works, great, use that! For those where this doesn't work, we need a new well known name. Perhaps it can find a "logical" place in arpa. Let's say it's based upon the ULA, and the home with prefix A:B:C:D gets D.C.B.A.homenet.arpa. (add this to DNS search path...) When an application resolves fridge.local, if the fridge has a GUA which it has provided to the CPE's DNS server, then it also returns a pointer to the "long-term name" (probably in a new RR) like "fridge.D.C.B.A.homenet.arpa". Any bookmarks and the like would contain that address (HTTP/HTML has existing mechanisms to deal with this), other applications might see this as the canonical name. (getaddrinfo(3) already has a canonname) My idea is that given IPv6 reachability for the HOME's CPE(s), that a mobile recursive (secure) DNS resolver can learn to make queries for D.C.B.A.homenet.arpa. directly to the home CPE, even when the mobile device is not "at home". The mobile device needs to be "pair"ed with the CPE such that it agrees to do this side-ways lookup. It's pretty much identical to a windows desktop joining an AD (but I can't speak to the "home edition" being able to do that... don't do windows). This process is, I admit, a form of walled garden DNS, something I've argued against as being unnecessary. I'd rather that the ISPs provided a name, but I feel that ISPs won't be very fast to offer this, and for the home user with no native IPv6 (using a managed tunnel, for instance), that a protocol such as I am suggesting, would provide a clear value (something people would brag about to their friends...) without requiring people to "wait" for their ISP. This does not replace "fridge.local" referring to the fridge on the network that you are on, but it does provide a way to easily discover and then bookmark "my fridge". (written offline using xemacs on android) _______________________________________________ homenet mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homenet
