On Sep 21, 2007, at 12:39, Doug Barton wrote:
On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:And I agree with James' vision: having servers announce their service through a discovery mechanism is more robust than having an outside system enumerate them.This part I agree with. I think mDNS has a very bright future, and makes total sense in the "stateless autoconfiguration" case. "Well known addresses" is a path we should not go down.
I should note that multicast DNS-SD is the zero configuration variant of the more general-case usage of DNS service discovery. I'm not making any argument against DHCP on the grounds that it fails to be a "zero configuration" protocol. That's the whole point of DHCP: it's *SUPPOSED* to be not a zero configuration protocol.
My whole argument against DHCP is that it reinvents name resolution and service discovery, requiring effort to keep state data coherent between DNS and DHCP services, which is unnecessary since DNS alone is sufficient for meeting service discovery needs.
I can't imagine any reasonable usage scenario where the alternative is true, i.e. where DHCP is a required component of the infrastructure, but DNS can be disabled everywhere because it isn't needed.
-- james woodyatt <jhw@apple.com> member of technical staff, communications engineering