Stuart Cheshire said: >What's happened is more complicated and more puzzling. Somehow the IETF >process has run out of control, and taken on a life of its own, and taken >us in a direction that makes little sense. I agree with this, and unfortunately this is not the only instance. In fact, one could argue that things would have turned out better had the IETF not been involved at all. >In almost every posting on the subject there's a tacit assumption by >almost everyone that these are two roughly equivalent competing >protocols, and they do the same thing, but do it in slightly different >ways. If that were true, then it would be a straightforward technical >analysis to see which does it best, and over time a migration to the >better one would be possible, sensible, and desirable. > >The problem is that they don't do the same thing. LLMNR can't replace >mDNS because LLMNR doesn't do what mDNS does, and LLMNR doesn't do what >mDNS does by design, not by oversight: Correct. >What happened here was *not* that the DNSEXT working group disagreed with >me on the technical details of my solution. What happened was that the >DNSEXT working group disagreed with me on the problem statement. I said, >"Here's a proposed way to do simple effective service discovery using >existing DNS record types." The DNSEXT working group said, "The DNS >protocol is not to be used for service discovery. We forbid it, and >furthermore, to prove the point, we're going to design a protocol of our >own that superficially looks like yours but can't be used for service >discovery." It was a "poison the well" response. They didn't create LLMNR >because they thought that a DNS-like multicast-based name lookup protocol >was a good idea. They created it because they saw it as the lesser of two >evils. It was a case of, "If we don't create this, then Stuart will >create something worse." At the time that DNSEXT made its decision, I was not even following the mDNS discussion very carefully. Since there had been a ZEROCONF BOF and agreement to proceed on mDNS work, my assumption was that DNSEXT WG was going to proceed on standardizing one of the presented solutions (either Bill Manning's solution or Stuart's) and we would implement it. However, after noticing that no document were advancing, we were told that the WG had rejected *both* proposals and that no work was planned. So work on LLMNR was (reluctantly) begun -- with the understanding that the objectionable aspects of the other proposals could not be incorporated. At the time I did not appreciate that agreeing to the DNSEXT WG preconditions would preclude the development of an interoperable solution. In retrospect, the correct thing to have done at that point would have been to give up on the DNSEXT WG entirely in order to work with Stuart on a joint design, as was done with IPv4 link local (which successfully interoperated before the IETF became involved). >What bothers me is the almost universal assumption that LLMNR is the >official successor to mDNS, or at least is intended to be. Everywhere I >read -- the LLMNR FAQ, Wikipedia, news articles, this IETF discussion -- >I see the same assumption repeated, taken so much for granted that it >doesn't even need to be stated. To me it's like someone on the evening >news telling the world, "Why waste money on expensive messy oil for your >car, when plain water works just as well? Go and drain your oil right now >and replace it with good old clean, environmentally-friendly tap-water." >If everyone actually did that, we'd all find out -- too late -- on the >drive to work tomorrow what a terrible idea it was. Funny you should mention that. I also have a problem with the accuracy of the Wikipedia articles, news articles and this IETF discussion. And I agree with you that LLMNR is not a successor to mDNS. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf