SRV as NS replacement

[Kevin Darcy]

shiva at well.com.invalid wrote:

> Is there any capability within BIND to use SRV in preference to NS records?
> Seems that if SRV is supposed be used to locate services, and is supposed
> to be able to replace MX for mail, it could also replace NS for finding
> name servers. (MX and NS would need to stay around for awhile for old
> clients, of course. Or get synthesized by the name server from SRV
> records.)

This is not a BIND issue, it's a protocol issue. The *only* record type
currently defined in all of the DNS standards, for delegating a zone or
publishing nameservers for a zone, is the NS record. Nothing else is currently
legal.

But, what does it really buy you to re-implement NS records as
SRV records? The protocol and port fields are wasted (unless we are going to
start allowing folks to run different domains on different port numbers, which
I think would be a really *bad* idea; consider the difficulty of implementing
firewall rules in such an environment). The preference and weight fields are
somewhat wasted, also, since nameservers are perfectly capable of tracking
reponse RTT, which is a more accurate measure than manually-configured,
one-size-fits-all preference and/or weight fields anyway.

In short, I see lots of pain and negligible gain.

But of course you are free to propose the change through the official
IETF channels.

By the way, I don't think anyone is even moving aggressively to replace
MX records with SRV records.


- Kevin