Subject: Re: What are the chances for OID resource records in the DNS?

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 21:22:10 -0400

Around 10:05 AM 09/20/2000 -0500, rumor has it that Gunther Schadow said:
>Dean Anderson wrote:
>
>> >[...] In addition, OIDs are a very useful identifier
>> >scheme since they allow a fully distributed management with little
technical
>> >overhead (unlike UUIDs or GUIDs).
>> 
>> You seem to misunderstand how UUID's work. While OID's are assigned like
>> domain names by a managing organization and the assignee is able to
>> "subdomain", by contrast UUID's are generated by the creator/developer, and
>> are guarenteed to be unique by the generator. UUID's have zero
>> technical/management overhead. The only disadvantage is that you wind up
>> having large, unordered lists of them, making them unwieldy to search
>> without a database.
>
>Well, the technical problem with UUIDs though is that you really need an
>Ethernet card to assign those, since UUIDs piggy back on the unique ID
>scheme of those Ethernet cards. What if you have no such basis? 

Good point.  I'll take a look at the UUID specs tomorrow if I have time.
It strikes me that there is a "non-ethernet" method for obtaining those 8
bytes of the UUID.

>Second
>technical problem is that there aren't that many UUID implementations 
>around on platforms other than Windoze (where UUIDs are called GUIDs).

Actually, The Open Group made DCE public, and made the RPC library (which
contains a UUID generator program) free several years ago. Its been ported
to Linux. There is some activity.  Certainly DCE, though not completely
dead, has certainly faded. I can't think of any other significant users of
UUID's except for the H.323 protocol stacks.   I think you can also find
code to generate UUID's in Openh323.

>> As a matter of history, I thought OID's came from SNMP ;-)
>
>That is interesting. Can you back that up? I thought the the OSI stems 
>even from the late 70's and early 80's. Was SNMP around already back
>then?

I guess not.  Someone posted that it came from ASN.1, upon which SNMP was
based.

> 
>> As an SNMP user (MIB-Looker-Upper), I think your idea has some merit, but
>> I'm not sure DNS is the right protocol. I'd think an LDAP server would be
>> well suited to handle this kind of data. Rather, a publicly accessible LDAP
>> server...
>
>LDAP is what everyone keeps recommending me. And yet there are two defects
>with LDAP: #1 is LDAP really designed to be so distributed as DNS? If we
>would run LDAP in the same massive distribution, wouldn't we reinvent the
>wheel? Wouldn't we have to solve all the DNSSEC issues once again for LDAP?
>#2 LDAP is not nearly as ubiquitous as the DNS. People would have to spend
>time and sweat to set up and maintain LDAP servers besides DNS. Most will
>have access to some DNS server already, but few will do LDAP. We have been
>setting up LDAP here, that's when I found how immature the implementation
>is. I'd much rather use BIND or any DNS server around the globe. That's why
>I am not actually eager to invent new DNS RR types. And it seems there isn't
>any new RR type needed. A PTR to some OID.ARPA. domain will do.

Well, the LDAP servers work.  Running them to cooperate this way might be
another thing...

On the other hand, there is no reason that DNS software can't be made to
run on another port instead of 53, nor that these "other" servers integrate
in the DNS name hierarchy somewhere.  Change some constants and recompile,
and you will have a working hierachical distributed database system...
That the protocol is the same as dns can be coincidental. ;-)  Maybe LDAP
should be obsolesced ;-)

		--Dean
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           Plain Aviation, Inc                  [email-masked]
           LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP          http://www.av8.com
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