Subject: Re: [weirds] one protocol to rule them all

From: Calvin Browne <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:03:37 +0200

On 15/02/2012,
Alessandro Vesely wrote:

|Perhaps, EPP is much more than a starting point.  It seems to me that
|if we modify RFC 5730 so as to allow*anonymous EPP*, it would be
|possible to use it instead of whois right away --mission accomplished.
|
|What am I missing?

The overheads associated with setting up an EPP type session are way more
than the overheads associated with an RFC 3912 type session.

Based on query loads for 'whois' type info - you really want your
spec to lean towards an RFC 3912 model and not an EPP model (and
by that I don't mean leaving the EPP data model behind if *that*
bit is thought useful).

(my 2bitcoins worth)

--Calvin

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From: "Alexander Mayrhofer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:34:11 +0100

> by that I don't mean leaving the EPP data model behind if *that*

I would like to go even one step further. In practice, even clients who
*do* have an EPP account with our registry tend to use WHOIS rather than
EPP info, because EPP is much more heavyweight (and hence slower) for
both client and server side (encryption, hard to debug, hard to get
client software for eg. web frameworks, session setup/teardown), and
also a limited resource (we do limit the number of parallel EPP sessions
to the registry system on a per-client basis). But, for some
applications (like check-as-you-type domain availability information),
even WHOIS tends to be too heavyweight for both client and server side. 

In order to address that, we do currently provide a "finger" (RFC1288)
based interface, which is still not fast enough in certain situations. I
was thinking about whether TCP itself is an overkill in such situations,
and allowing CoAP as an even more lightweight transport protocol for a
RESTful WHOIS would help in such use cases.

Has anybody looked into this option yet? I remember that lots of effort
in CRISP went into the discussion of the appropriate transport protocol,
and i don't necessarily want to open that can of worms, but it might be
worthwhile to think a little bit outside of the HTTP-constrained box
;-).

Alex

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From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:52:50 -0800

Hi Alex,
>RESTful WHOIS would help in such use cases.

I wondered when someone would bring up CoAP.  :-)  Carsten Bormann 
posted a comment when it was mentioned in another working group ( 
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/domainrep/current/msg00756.html ).

Regards,
-sm

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From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Feb 2012 20:58:02 -0000

>RESTful WHOIS would help in such use cases.

This came up in another context.  I think you'd have to show an awful lot
of people who find TCP transactions too slow, before you could make a
sensible argument to use something other than HTTP as the transport.

Personally, I have a lot of complaints about WHOIS, but excessively
slow transport isn't one of them.  HTTP and WHOIS are basically the
same at the lowest level, one round trip in a TCP session.  We already
have a variety of ways to speed up HTTP, such as web caches and
session keepalive.

If you have some private arrangement with a provider to do lightning
fast access, you can do whatever you want, but standards are about
the connections that everyone can use.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly