g'day,
David R. Conrad wrote:
>
> Charlie,
>
> > DNS is supposed to be a way to resolve domain names into IP addresses.
>
> As a hammer is supposed to be a way to pound nails. However, when it is
> perceived that all you have is a hammer, it is amazing what begins to look
> like nails.
Actually, I think it would be as accurate to say "DNS is a distributed
database service. The first application was name to IP address
translation, but it's now used for a number of such applications."
As someone pointed out in another message in this thread, if you started
designing a new distributed, scalable database service for the Internet,
you'd probably come up with something that looks a lot like DNS. You're
likely to add some things specific to your application, but the basics
would be the there.
> > How else would one get an IP(v6) address from a domain name other
> > than by using DNS? Am I missing something here?
>
> Yes. The DNS has grown a bit from a simple lookup mechanism.
Actually, it's still a relatively simple lookup mechanism (boolean
domain names, anyone? :-) The interesting thing is how many different
applications for this technology there are, with more coming along. Some
of these new applications would benefit from changes to the technology
(such as adding support for various types of searching, for example) but
because of the mission critical nature of the initial existing services
the community is loath to take experimenting too far. At some point you
have to wonder if this is not having a chilling effect on innovation and
whether the technology wouldn't benefit from moving some of this stuff
out of the current service and legacy root.
- peterd
--
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"Suddenly, nothing happened"
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