Paul Vixie writes: > somebody asked me a few months ago why "it's always dns"? meaning, > why are so many mysteries and outages ultimately traced down to > something broken in dns?
Personally, even despite having the relevant haiku as my desktop background, I push back on this when it rears its head. I mean, even ignoring the trouble with absolutes like "always", which can rapidly be disproven. The DNS is remarkably robust. Even when a problem can be "ultimately traced down to something broken in the dns", it is often not the DNS itself that was broken. It frequently did a wonderful job of providing the answers it was told to provide. Sometimes it even did so heroically while under assault. And, of course, many times the problematic answers had nothing whatsoever to do with Stupid DNS Tricks(tm). So why is it perceived to be "always dns"? Because the DNS stands at an incredibly important juncture between people and machines. That interface is a concentrator and bound to be where failures on one side or the other become visible. That should be the answer to a non-DNS person asking why it always seems to be the DNS, not harping on the particular sub-developments that we don't care for. It can be fun to joke about, but please let's not feed the narrative that the DNS as a whole is pitifully flawed. Even with (despite?) the features that you dislike, it still has done an amazing job as a fundamental piece of the amazing technological advancement that has been the Internet. _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list -- dnsop@ietf.org To unsubscribe send an email to dnsop-le...@ietf.org
