Re: Reality Check and Ideas

Brian Onn (onn nospam at tibco.com)
Wed, 10 Mar 1999 11:46:38 -0800

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This was my point exactly, in an earlier message, being behind a corporate
firewall myself.

DNS has it's merits as the storage, transport and replication facility. There
are clients that exist to access it, it's free, all those good things. It's
not a good DB in general ("give me all the Rock albums, from 1967-1990, by the
Rolling stones") but I don't think this is a design goal of the cd index
database, anyway.

We haven't really talked much about LDAP. It has replication for free too, and
it's probably an equally or better suited wheel to re-use for this purpose than
DNS is. I wholeheartedly agree with Alan Cox that we should not re-invent any
database distribution or replication protocols to support this cause, but let's
not limit ourselves to DNS. Neither DNS nor LDAP protocols are generally
passed through corporate firewalls, so no matter what the underlying database
and distribution mechanism is, the access protocol, I believe, should always be
HTTP in order to make it universally accepted.

Brian

"Gary D. Foster" wrote:

> >>>>> "r" == rstad <Ragnar> writes:
>
> r> A firewall that blocks DNS traffic would have to have some
> r> relaying - if not http would be useless, right!
>
> You're missing a vital element here.
>
> I'm sitting at my desk... I have no access to outside DNS
> information. I can go to my webproxy and browse outside... but that's
> because the web proxy is configured to use outside DNS sources. That
> does me absolutely no good on my desktop and if it requires installing
> a separate proxy on the firewall or a separate service to gate
> protocols it's going to fall flat on it's face.
>
> r> I can't see why DNS-relaying should be a problem.
>
> Then you obviously don't sit behind the same type of corporate
> firewall that thousands of us do.

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