Subject: draft-levone-dns-wins-lookup-01.txt

From: "Matt Crawford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 14:17:10 -0500

This seems like a wrong approach to the problem for several reasons.

1. A WINS server may know if a name has gone away, but cannot tell
the DNS server.

2. If you enable this WINS RR feature "at the root of the zone"
example.org, then a query coming in for foo.a.b.c.d.e.example.org
will apparently activate all the same processing as foo.example.org.

3. It requires that you permit WINS access from the off-site
secondaries that you're urged to have for your zone.

4. Both offered choices for handing non-A queries are awkward.

5. You generally can't resolve the address of a WINS client that
happens to be down or unreachable at the moment.

6. What the DNS server returns upon timeout of the "NetBIOS node
adapter status query" generated by a DNS PTR query is not stated.
Attempting to specify the DNS server's behavior in this case would
probably lead to the conclusion that the only right response is
SRVFAIL.  Ugh!

7. This new "local" flag which causes omission of an RR from a zone
transfer looks like an awful idea!  After spending a few paragraphs
on prevention of misleading NXDOMAIN returns, this puts them right
back in.

8. Last, but not least, it's explicitly incompatible with DNS
Security.

As a complete alternative, I suggest having a WINS server dynamically
update DNS using already-specified methods.
______________________________________________________________________
Matt Crawford                [email-masked]                 Fermilab

to unsubscribe send a message to [email-masked] with
the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.