I'm not wedded to the CNAME hack.
Actually, I was thinking about that. Consider a hack on a DNS server
that gives all records an absolute expiry time that marches forward
in (say) 5-minute intervals. Then when the DNS server is queried,
the TTL is computed to be the difference between the current time
and the next absolute expiry.
That had occurred to me. Another possibility is to embed serial numbers
in the records and if the client sees it's out of sync, it goes back to
the root and starts over.
PS: While you're at it, SMTP needs to be replaced, too.
Apples and oranges. SMTP was designed for sending email, which
it excels at. The DNS was designed as essentially a distributed
lookup table. It was never designed to be warped into a read-only
B-tree. :)
Snerk. SMTP was designed for a network with no security where everyone
behaved themselves and all the mail was ASCII text. We shoehorned in
formatted mail and file attachments with MIME, kludged in some security
with S/MIME and later SPF and DKIM, and are now in the midst of a really,
really big kludge to try to add Unicode addressing in EAI. It passed its
best-by date decades ago, but it shares with the DNS the fact that it
exists, and the putatively better alternatives don't.*
Regards,
John Levine, jo...@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.
* - Well, OK, X.400 exists. Sort of.
