CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_



Reported by Rob Austein/Epilogue Technology

Minutes of the Domain Name System Working Group (DNS)

The meeting opened with a few comments by the Chair regarding the future
of the Working Group.  In brief, the Working Group has been in existence
for a long time, with ill-defined goals and an odd mixture of tasks.
Some of the Working Group's tasks are of an ongoing nature, some are
very specific with definite goals and milestones.  As currently
organized, the Working Group does not fit well into the IETF
administrative structure.  At some point in the relatively near future
it may be necessary to restructure the Group to address this problem.
The Chair will be working with the Director of the new IETF Service
Applications Area to address this issue.

Given the state of flux that the IESG and the IETF itself were in at the
time of the Working Group meeting, the Working Group decided to spin off
a few well-defined tasks to ``sub-groups'' but otherwise leave the
current DNS Working Group structure unchanged.  Whether the
``sub-groups'' would be full-fledged IETF working groups or just
subcommittees of the DNS Working Group was left unspecified; the
organizers of the three sub-groups spun off at this meeting all
subsequently expressed a distinct preference for being subcommittees
rather than independent working groups.

The next item of business was to dispose of some old tasks that were
still listed on the Group's Charter.  The following tasks were removed
from the task list:


 1. Discussion of adding a Responsible Person RR.
 2. Discussion of adding network naming capability to the DNS.
 3. Implementation catalogue for DNS software.
 4. Writing a ``DNS operators guide''.


Tasks (1) and (2) were done years ago and published in RFCs 1183 and
1101, respectively.  Task (3) was killed for lack of any volunteers who
care about it enough to write it; if such a volunteer exists, that
person should just write the document, we don't need a group effort to
do this.

The Group also briefly discussed writing a ``DNS Operators guide'', Task
(4).  Since both RFCs 1032-1033 and an O'Reilly Associates book exist on
the subject, the Group felt that writing such a document would be a
waste of time.  Stuart Vance agreed to write a one-page document
referring readers to the O'Reilly Associates book; if there are other
published documents on this subject, whether commercial or free, please
announce them on the Namedroppers list for possible mention in Stuart's
reference.

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Next on the Agenda were the three tasks that were felt by the Group to
be of sufficient interest to form a subgroup to work on each task.  Each
task was discussed for long enough to air some of the issues that needed
to be addressed, then the Chair called for someone willing to organize a
subgroup willing to attack the problem and report back.


 1. Scaling problems of ``big zones'', particularly the .COM zone.
    The Working Group has been kicking this problem around for a year
    without much progress.  Discussion was limited to a summary of the
    problem by Mike St.  Johns and to new suggestions by the Working
    Group.  One-line summary:  some of the first-level DNS zones are
    approaching the size of the old NIC HOSTS.TXT file, which leads to
    various technical and political problems.  Please see the Minutes
    of previous DNS Working Group meetings for background on this
    discussion.
    John Romkey pointed out that, as the Internet grows and more hosts
    are registered in the DNS, it will be increasingly hard to maintain
    any kind of obvious correlation between DNS names and ``real''
    names.  All the proposed ``solutions'' to the .COM zone problem
    will exacerbate this situation; the only exception is the
    ``XYZCORP.X.COM'' partitioning scheme, which, while ugly, is at
    least obvious.  In the long run we need a solution to the problem
    of unintuitive names in the DNS. Whatever solution we pick for the
    .COM zone should be chosen with this in mind, so that we don't make
    the problem worse.
    Bill Manning agreed to lead a subgroup to investigate the problem
    and report back.  The subgroup's mailing list is ``[email protected]'',
    send mail to ``[email protected]'' to join the list.

 2. DNS security.
    The Working Group heard a report from Steve Crocker, Director of
    the IETF Security Area.  There are really two tasks under
    discussion.

    (a) The first security task is bulletproofing the DNS so that it
        cannot be spoofed without ability to spoof IP addresses; this
        is, essentially, Paul Mockapetris's ``Just As Good As IP''
        security mechanism, as described by Paul at the ``DNS-II'' BOF
        held at the 25th IETF in Washington DC. This level of security
        could also be described as ``robustness,'' that is,
        implementation of Paul's techniques would help defend the
        global DNS database against some of the accidental spoofing
        that has happened over the years.  This is primarily an
        implementation issue, and wheels are already rolling to get
        this mechanism into a near-future release of BIND. Watch the
        namedroppers list for announcements.

    (b) The second security task is specifying a mechanism by which RRs
        could be accompanied by digital signature information for
        authentication.  Both for backwards compatibility with existing
        DNS software and in order to avoid running afoul of U.S. export

                                  2





        controls on cryptographic software, this signature must be an
        optional mechanism, added in such a way that non-players can
        ignore it and still comply with the DNS protocols.  The general
        idea is to define a new RR type, the RDATA portion of which
        would be used to contain the digital signature.  James Galvin
        agreed to lead a subgroup to work on this project and report
        back to the Working Group.  The subgroup's mailing list is
        ``[email protected]'', send mail to
        ``[email protected]'' to join the list.


 3. Load balancing.
    This task has been with the Working Group for a long time.  At the
    time of this meeting there were at least four mechanisms proposed
    to solve some aspect of the ``load balancing'' problem, some
    already in widespread use, one requiring no protocol changes at
    all.  Tom Brisco and Stuart Vance agreed to lead a subgroup to
    investigate this problem and document their conclusions.  The
    subgroup's mailing list is ``[email protected]'', send mail
    to ``[email protected]'' to join the list.


Next, the Working Group heard a report on the current status of the DNS
MIB from Frank Kastenholz, representing the IETF Network Management
Directorate.  In brief, the DNS MIB has been stalled since the 25th IETF
for two reasons:


 1. The Network Management Area Directorate has been busy with the
    emerging SNMPv2 specification and suffered some disorganization due
    to the abrupt resignation of its Area Director, and

 2. The DNS MIB presents some non-trivial problems, because there are
    some cases where the ``SNMP way'' and the ``DNS way'' of doing
    things are diametrically opposed.


Problem (1) is already being repaired:  a new Area Director for Network
Management was elected two days after the DNS Working Group meeting, and
the SNMPv2 specification is on its way out the door.

Problem (2) will be addressed by Frank (representing the Network
Management Area Directorate) and the authors of the DNS MIB.

Frank suggested that the DNS Working Group consider whether or not SNMP
was really the right tool for all of the management tasks addressed by
the DNS MIB, and for the proposed dynamic update mechanism (dynamic
creation and deletion of RRs via a network protocol); it's possible that
extensions to the DNS protocol might be more appropriate for some of
these tasks.  James Galvin pointed out a counter-argument:  if DNS
management is not done via SNMP, the extended DNS protocol would need to
duplicate much of the mechanism of SNMP, including the security
features.  The Working Group decided to press ahead with cleaning up the

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DNS MIB, given that we've already spent so much time on it.

Next, Susan Thomson gave a presentation on DNS support for PIP. The
presentation was basicly the same material covered in the PIP-DNS
Internet-Draft (``draft-ietf-pip-dns-00.txt'').  The Group discussed
three problems with the PIP-DNS proposal:


 1. The PIP-DNS proposal creates two new semi-wildcard QTYPEs (the PIP
    document calls these ``special-purpose query types'').
    Semi-wildcard QTYPEs have known problems when combined with DNS
    caching algorithms, as documented in RFC-973, page 4, ``MD and MF
    replaced by MX''. The Working Group recommended that the PIP Group
    redesign their proposal to get rid of the semi-wildcard QTYPEs.

 2. The proposed BBD (BackBone Descriptor) RR format defined a
    one-octet field to select the character set used in the variable
    length text portions of the RR. The Working Group recommended that
    this be eliminated and that the variable length text portions of
    the RR be limited to the NETASCII character set.

 3. PIP includes a mechanism by which a PIP implementation can know
    that it needs to get a fresh copy of an RR. The PIP implementors
    would like to have a way to speed propagation of fresh information
    when this happens.  Discussion of this subject on the Namedroppers
    list suggests that one way to accomplish this would be the addition
    of an RR timestamping mechanism to the DNS. To date we do not know
    how to add such timestamps without an incompatible change to the
    DNS protocols, so we may not be able to help the PIP implementors
    here.  This issue was left open, due to time pressure at the
    Working Group meeting.


There was a brief discussion of the proposed X.400 ``temporary'' routing
mechanism (using the DNS to replace X.400 routing tables).  Those
members of the Working Group who had read the proposal felt that it was
seriously flawed and could not be implemented as specified.  Rob Austein
and Jon Postel volunteered to meet with the authors of the proposal in
order to find the right answer to this problem.  Said meeting took place
two days later, and resulted in a better solution, to be documented by
Claudio Allocchio, one of the authors of the original proposal.

At this point, having run out of time and having covered all the major
items on the Agenda, the meeting was adjourned.

Attendees

N. Akiko Aizawa          [email protected]
Philip Almquist          [email protected]
Randall Atkinson         [email protected]
Robert Austein           [email protected]
David Battle             [email protected]
David Bolen              [email protected]

                                  4





Erik-Jan Bos             [email protected]
David Bridgham           [email protected]
Thomas Brisco            [email protected]
Sandy Bryant             [email protected]
Henry Clark              [email protected]
Wayne Clark              [email protected]
David Conklin            [email protected]
Stephen Crocker          [email protected]
John Curran              [email protected]
Chas DiFatta             [email protected]
James Galvin             [email protected]
Richard Graveman         [email protected]
Steven Hubert            [email protected]
Daniel Karrenberg        [email protected]
Frank Kastenholz         [email protected]
David Katinsky           [email protected]
Kenneth Key              [email protected]
John Klensin             [email protected]
John Linn                [email protected]
Daniel Long              [email protected]
Steven Lunt              [email protected]
Paul Lustgraaf           [email protected]
Bruce Mackey             [email protected]
Bill Manning             [email protected]
Clifford Neuman          [email protected]
William Nowicki          [email protected]
Masataka Ohta            [email protected]
Andrew Partan            [email protected]
Brad Passwaters          [email protected]
Michael Patton           [email protected]
John Penners             [email protected]
Jon Postel               [email protected]
Robert Reschly           [email protected]
John Romkey              [email protected]
Jon Saperia              [email protected]
Carl Schoeneberger       [email protected]
Tim Seaver               [email protected]
Allyson Showalter        [email protected]
Michael St.  Johns       [email protected]
Martha Steenstrup        [email protected]
Bernhard Stockman        [email protected]
Susan Thomson            [email protected]
L. Stuart Vance          [email protected]
Ruediger Volk            [email protected]
Chuck Warlick            [email protected]
Jane Wojcik              [email protected]



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