microsoft claims

[Igmar Palsenberg]

> Well, I don't think the police will hunt you down should you put a UTF-8 
> string in your domain name server... :-)
> 
> More seriously, RFCs 952 and 1123 define that a "hostname" should consist 
> only of A-Z, 0-9, and "-".  Clearly, most UTF-8 values violate this 
> definition.  However, a domain name can consist of any value and there is 
> _very_ strong pressure (particularly out of Asia) to internationalization 
> of the DNS.  One of the approaches is to use the approach Microsoft has 
> taken, namely simply putting UTF-8 on the wire.  Unfortunately, this 
> approach has several flaws:
> 
> a) it breaks software (like MTAs, MUAs, etc.) that "knows" host names can 
> only be A-Z, 0-9, and "-", sometimes in particularly unpleasant ways.
> b) as it is variably multi-byte, the use of UTF-8 can significantly limit 
> the number of glyphs one can use in a name for some languages
> c) Microsoft did it, therefore it must be inherently evil (well, not 
> really, but that seems to be the impression I get from the IETF sometimes)
> 
> Another twist is that there are many known bugs in UTF-8 implementations 
> (Microsoft's encoding and decoding in particular) that make trying to 
> figure out what a UTF-8 value is supposed to be a bit "challenging".
> 
> On the other hand, using UTF-8 works (most of the time) with modern 
> browsers, so people can make use of UTF-8 strings in the DNS today.
> 
> However, in the context of the original post, even the folks in Microsoft 
> who wrote their DNS software have publicly stated at the Pittsburgh IETF 
> that they consider their approach of "just send UTF-8" a bad idea, so I 
> find it a bit weird that they are claiming this is a good thing.  Marketing 
> != Reality, I guess...

This is answer I've been waiting for. And it basically kills M$ claims :

GSS-TSIG isn't supported : No, is propretary and won't be supported. New
versions of Bind will support the IETF standard. I thought lastest version
already did, seems not.

WINS is not supported : No, of course not. A WINS server is used because
NetBIOS is non-routable, and you need a Wins server if you have machines
on a different subnet.

I really don't see the relation with DNS in this case, but that could be
the lack of coffee for this day..

M$ 'just' implemented UTF-8, and basically screws standards. The same they
did with Kerberos.

> 
> Rgds,
> -drc



	Igmar