Question About Terminology

[Ronan Flood]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 17:03:20 -0700,
Chris Buxton <cbuxton at menandmice.com> wrote:

> I am glad to have confirmed that "stub resolver" is acceptable use,  
> though I am not at all surprised that "resolver" by itself is still  
> used to refer to this component. Even with that, general acceptance  
> of the phrase "stub resolver" suggests that "resolver" is  
> sufficiently unspecific to allow for other types of resolvers. But  
> I'm not convinced that use of the term "smart resolver", as we have  
> been doing internally, is warranted.

I think "stub" in this sense is an RPC (remote procedure call) usage.
The client process needs a resolver, but you don't want a full resolver
built into each client; so you have a set of routines which looks like
a resolver, but is just a stub which only marshalls the arguments and
passes queries on to the actual resolver.

So "stub resolver" and "resolver" are it, really.

The fact that the RPC mechanism uses the same network protocol as the
resolver itself uses to query nameservers is a neat design decision.

IMHO.

-- 
                      Ronan Flood <R.Flood at noc.ulcc.ac.uk>
                        working for but not speaking for
             Network Services, University of London Computer Centre
     (which means: don't bother ULCC if I've said something you don't like)