Subject: Re: ahh, the dreaded opt-in discussion again

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 15:40:19 +0700

Date:        Fri, 25 Oct 2002 16:09:47 -0400
    From:        Edward Lewis <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <a05111b14b9df349bf0e0@[192.149.252.228]>

I have been "not reading" this list for the past few weeks, just
catching up, sorry for the late reply.

  | Debate: do we just live with this because "who in their right mind 
  | would use BOTH wildcards AND opt-in in the SAME zone?"

Yes.   Or perhaps more appropriately, no-one sane is going to care
whether wildcard names exist or not, in an op-in zone.   If I can create
any new name I like anyway (make it appear that the name exists), whether
or not there would have been a wildcard is irrelevant.

  | Opt-in is beginning to seem more like a Quality of Service of DNS. 
  | QOS for bandwidth has problems - as Randy Bush said at a DARPA PI 
  | meeting panel last January, QoS means dropping packets in favor of 
  | other packets.  The problem is that dropping packets is not what 
  | providers are there for.  (I may have part of this wrong, the essence 
  | is that QoS in bandwidth services runs counter to the aim of the 
  | service.)

That's the kind of nice sounding platitude that turns out to be completely
wrong when you look at it more closely.

Kind of like "Doctors are to save lives, not take them", which is all
very fine in a perfect world, but given 5 patients, all about to die
without immediate attention, and 3 doctors, then either the doctors
attempt to look after all 5, in which case probably many of them die,
or they look after the 3 with the best chances - choosing the other 2
to be sacrificed.

Of course service providers are there to drop packets, that's their job,
they just prefer not to tell people that, because it doesn't sound good.

But the alternative in that case is to queue packets (or provide unlimited
bandwidth, and that as an option isn't very likely).  Queueing packets is
just fine for a very short time, after that, packets are supposed to be
dropped, and the ISP is supposed to do that.   That's what TCP wants, it
is how it detects congestion, it is what real time applications want
(where delivery late is a waste if time), etc.   QoS is just an attempt
to give the service providers some kind of information to allow them to
decide which packets to drop, rather than picking at random (kind of like
the doctors selecting the patients with the best chances to survive).

kre

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