Re: Reality Check and Ideas

August Zajonc (augustz nospam at bigfoot.com)
Tue, 09 Mar 1999 15:27:22 -0800

I agree with Alan on this one, that NNTP is not well suited at all...

However, I am still skeptical of this DNS idea... As this project grows, and
it will with all the hobyiests out there, and we start to throw in things
like cover art and the like, or even want to be able to do more than query a
cd hash (perhaps a artist query, or a song query or...) this DNS idea
becomes unweildy.

And no one has pointed out exactly whats wrong with the HTTP approch, aside
from the fact that it's load may be slightly higher...

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 3:19 PM
Subject: Re: Reality Check and Ideas

> DNS is hierarchical organized, CDs are not. The way Message IDs are
> used in NNTP to distribute and access news articles is much closer to
> what is needed for CDs than DNS is.

Sorry to piss in your bucket but

NNTP is a flood fill scheme with no expiry other than time, no replication,
no control of distribution pattern

DNS is [buzzword hat on] a highly scalable replicating database with
extensive
caching including optional negative caches fault tolerance and load
balancing

If it can handle all the porn sites in the world it can handle cddb. In
fact I've got a mini proof of concept working already

You query for

AA.BB.CC.DD.[somedomain] for a TXT record

Where AA BB CC DD are the codes computed with the GPL licensed (and thus
indisputably clean) reference code.

The hash is fairly even so you can delegate multiple master servers for
DD=1 DD=2 etc when the system goes large

DNS also goes through firewalls nicely.

Final proof this is all sane - my test code is a shell script.

Alan