Re: [sitefinder-tech-discuss] A small technical suggestion

[Mo McKinlay <mo.mckinlay@cirrus-multimedia.ltd.uk>]

On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 09:33:15PM -0400, Andrew Newton wrote:

> This is an interesting idea, and, in my opinion, probably deserving of 
> an IETF I-D even without consideration of DNS wildcards and SiteFinder. 
>  I am not aware of an RFC specifying SRV records for HTTP, but there 
> does seem to have been some discussion on this very topic in the IETF's 
> DNSOP working group around February, 2002.

I'll have a look into that...

> With regard to wildcard SRV records, I do not believe that 
> _http._tcp.*.com is any more RFC compliant than www.*.com.

No, that I'll grant you. Both are quite likely to "work", mind, and
[allowing browser support], the former will have the desired effect while
the latter won't (as most end-users rarely, if ever, type the 'www' part of
a URL - in fact, you'll be lucky to get anything except a domain name).

That said, I agree completely that _http._tcp.*.anything is a horrible hack
- but it's a hack which won't break FTP, SSH, Telnet, IRC, and (most
importantly, it seems) SMTP - which is more than can be said for '* 86400 IN
A 64.94.110.11'.

To be fair, the suggestion of a wildcard SRV was one of 'lesser of two
evils', though that's measured on a breakage metric, rather than a
compliance one - the A wildcard is technically compliant, but breaks lots of
things; www.* or _http._tcp.* isn't compliant, but doesn't break nearly as
much. Personally, I'd prefer neither, but I'm not making such decisions.

Cheers,

Mo

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