Doi: 10.1145/1610252.1610269
Article development led by
queue.acm.org
DNS is many things to many people—
perhaps too many things to too many people.
BY PauL VixiE
What
DnS
is not
A DoMAin nAMe SySteM (DNS) is a hierarchical,
distributed, autonomous, reliable database. The first and
only of its kind, it offers real-time performance levels to
a global audience with global contributors. Every TCP/IP
traffic flow including every Web page view begins with at
least one DNS transaction. DNS is, in a word, glorious.
To underline our understanding of
what DNS is, we must differentiate it
from what it is not. The Internet economy rewards unlimited creativity in the
monetization of human action, and
fairly often this takes the form of some
kind of intermediation. For DNS, monetized intermediation means lying. The
innovators who bring us such monetized intermediation do not call what
they sell lies, but in this case it walks
like a duck and quacks like one, too.
Not all misuses of DNS take the form
of lying. Another frequently seen abuse
is to treat DNS as a directory system,
which it is not. In a directory system
one can ask approximate questions and
get approximate answers. Think of a
printed telephone white pages directory here: users often find what they want
in the printed directory not by knowing
exactly what the listing is but by starting with a guess or a general idea. DNS
has nothing like that: all questions and
all answers are exact. But DNS has at
least two mechanisms that can be misused to support approximate matching
at some considerable cost to everybody
else, and a lot of that goes on.
Stupid DnS tricks
