Re: IANA type code registration clean up

[Edward Lewis <Ed.Lewis@neustar.biz>]

At 10:39 +1000 6/14/07, Mark Andrews wrote:

> 	Of the list above BIND 9 only implements NSAP-PTR.
> 	ATM looks like it is straight forward to implement.

The question isn't how easy they are to implement.  It's whether they 
should be	defined in such a way that it is trivial to find the 
specification.

For ATMA, I have kept my eye on that reference for years, ever since 
I wrote DNSSEC code in the late 90's.  It's a no-brainer, if you have 
the document.  Back then, it was on the ATM Forum's web site, I found 
it via a MSN technical documents page that I probably got to via 
Altavista or some such antique search engine.

When the ATM Forum disbanded I learned that web site was transferred 
to the MFA Forum.  Eventually the MFA Forum retired the ATM Forum web 
site and moved the document to their public store.

Today I tried to contact the IANA-listed mail address for the 
document.  The host of the mail address is no longer in DNS.  I was 
hoping to ask the listed contact person whether the record was still 
in use.

I tried to Google for the contact while writing this and learned that 
Amazon is selling a book by him (or someone with the same name and a 
lot of other intangible similarities) and that he's a CTO of some 
company.  Googling for that company I see it was merged into another 
in 2001.  Umm, maybe you get the idea that it's a bit hard to chase 
down the references.  Maybe he's now george.dobrowski@conexant.com 
from a March 2006 attendee list on the web.

I've been concerned that we may lose this document at some point. 
Not that the MFA Forum would have a reason to hide it or yank it, it 
might just be thrown out as obsoleted trash someday. It's not trivial 
to implement what you can't get the specification for.

For the other records, I am sure they are also trivial to implement, 
I recall EID being simple.  But these never for adopted by the IETF 
(I don't know why).  Should we take this as an implicit statement 
that those type values ought to be "reserved by IANA?"  I think it is 
a no-brainer that we document the types we know and "control" (in the 
sense of an IETF action) that are dead but have type values.

The ATMA is a weird case - it never was reviewed by the IETF, not as 
far as I can find.  So we can't really pass judgement on it.  Still 
it would be nice to know that there is a specification for it, where 
it is, and if it is ever deprecated by the owning organization that 
we make a note of that in the IANA registry for DNS parameters.

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Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

Sarcasm doesn't scale.

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