Re: Reality Check and Ideas

August Zajonc (augustz nospam at bigfoot.com)
Tue, 09 Mar 1999 15:51:34 -0800

hehe... I smell the start of a little battle of the minds.

If this is the same DNS that I have set up a number of times... well, I'm
back ;-)...
I see the concept, and it'd be easy to implement my a linux (coincidentally
redhat) box with all the little nifty tools we can call such as dig and
nslookup from a shell script. Unimpressed by the proof of concept, we know
it works on a small scale, we could all probably put up proofs or out cgi
script parsing a txt file for a proper checksum=data pair, or php files
hiting mySQL db's for key=value pairs or... :) And can DNS handle millions
of records? Absolutly.

What I guess I'm missing is what are we gaining here... Why DNS? The
arguements in favor are that it exisits, that it has been proven to handle
large numbers of records, that secondary nameservice could be provided as a
slick backup method. There are probably more. But most of these hold true in
the http method as well. They are esentially the same thing, with either the
checksum as a domain or as an argument on a url. Does it come down to which
one scales better?

I will confess I don't know of a way of updating my zone files from a client
remotely without using something other than DNS such as an http query.
You'll have to enlighten me there... (This would be when people add
tracks/cds etc)...

August

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Cox <alan nospam at redhat.com>
To: cdindex nospam at freeamp.org <cdindex nospam at freeamp.org>
Date: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 3:23 PM
Subject: Re: Reality Check and Ideas

> Doing DNS is well, stupid :) There is little flexibility, how do you
submit
> updates (another mechanisim will have to be built anways...) and a whole
> host of ther problems... Youch... Each DNS record contains ALL the fields,
> we'll be passing back gigs before we know it? With an http query different
> results could be returned (cover art or not etc...)

Wrong. Go and learn about DNS then come back with a clue

> lie ahead. Remeber, future flexibilty is key, simplicity is jey (plenty of
> people can host a cgi script for http lookups, how many can provide DNS
> servers, and all that entails?)

I wrote my DNS proof of concept in 2 minutes, and then spent 5 checking the
RFC legalities on TXT records

It works.