FW: DISCUSS: draft-ietf-ops-rfc3291bis-04.txt

["Wijnen, Bert (Bert)" <bwijnen@lucent.com>]

Juergen here a DISCUSS from Ted.
I think it is OK to change the "must fully describe.." into
a "MUST fully describe". In fact I think that makes sense.

Not sure I (yet) fully understand if such description
(or any text withing 3291bis) needs to speak about wether
a query for A or a AAAA is needed. 

Comments?

Bert 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Hardie [mailto:hardie@qualcomm.com]
Sent: dinsdag 25 mei 2004 17:14
To: iesg@ietf.org
Subject: DISCUSS: draft-ietf-ops-rfc3291bis-04.txt


The draft gives InetAddressDNS as:

InetAddressDNS ::= TEXTUAL-CONVENTION
       DISPLAY-HINT "255a"
       STATUS      current
       DESCRIPTION
           "Represents a DNS domain name. The name SHOULD be fully
             qualified whenever possible.

             The corresponding InetAddressType is dns(16).

             The DESCRIPTION clause of InetAddress objects that may have
             InetAddressDNS values must fully describe how (and when) such
             names are to be resolved to IP addresses.

             This textual convention SHOULD NOT be used directly in object
             definitions since it restricts addresses to a specific format.
             However, if it is used, it MAY be used either on its own or in
             conjunction with InetAddressType as a pair."
       SYNTAX      OCTET STRING (SIZE (1..255))

and further describes this in 4.4.

I am concerned that the " must fully describe" text is not normative.
The related text in 4.4 *is* normative at a SHOULD level.  Though
this text has not changed from 3291, and I am concerned about
requesting a change, I believe this has to be a MUST.

As it stands now, an InetAddress object without that DESCRIPTION
and with only this InetAdddressType (which the SHOULDs allow) may
be unaddressable. A user/device attempting to resolve it may not know
whether to query for an A or a AAAA record and may run into problems
with split DNS similar to the global/local scopes for IP addresses.  I
am concerned about this primarily because there might be cases where
the same DNS name would point to different hosts with at A and AAAA
or different hosts on different sides of the split DNS, so this
is not just a failed connection case, but possibly a wrong data case.