Re: zeroconf name resolution does not mean necessarily DNS

[Aidan Williams <aidan@arc.corp.mot.com>]

Alain Durand wrote:
> What is needed is something to map local names to IP addresses
> in a zeroconf environment (no DNS server)
> This does mean that whatever we design has to be integrate in the
> general name resolution process of operating system and does not
> mean it has to be integrated in the DNS itself.
> 

This discussion has been had before.  The zeroconf working group
charter only talks about developing two new protocols, and a name
service protocol is not one of them.  Rather, the expectation was
that the existing DNS protocol would be 'profiled' for zeroconf use.

In suggesting that the requirements document is broken w.r.t. using
DNS for name resolution, I think there is a charter issue.

> As I said earlier, there is usually a switch to say in what order to
> do name resolution: example: first FILES, then NIS then DNS
> What is needed is just another local scope name service.
> 

This discussion has been had on the dnsext mailing list too.
I wrote a draft describing the update of the DHCP search list option
supporting this sort of thing, but subsequently this turned out to be
a bad idea because of the complexity of the per-interface and
search-order interactions.

> So, my point is that whatever we design does not need to look like DNS at all.
> It may, but is not required and it may or may not be desirable.
> 

Indeed, I have a lot of sympathy for that view, and I could live with
ICMPv6 Node Information Query as the IPv6 zeroconf name resolution
protocol.

To my mind, mDNS and the ICMPv6 Node Information Query are pretty much
the same protocol.  They both use multicast, and DNS formatted packets,
but the encapsulation is different (icmp vs udp).

Therefore the issues that are dogging the mDNS protocol ought to apply
also to the ICMPv6 NI Query.  If we define the NI Query as "not DNS",
we could easily define mDNS as "not DNS" (and if I recall correctly,
that was suggested in the meeting too).

regards
	aidan
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