31 May
2016
31 May
'16
4:41 p.m.
Paul...
On 2016-05-31 15:52, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
Paul, I'm sure there are a lot of things about DECdns that are both well
designed and interesting. Unfortunately I know pretty much nothing about
it. :-(
On May 28, 2016, at 11:00 PM, Mark Abene
<phiber at phiber.com> wrote:
DECdns serves a similar purpose to the real DNS, except it's
specifically for resolving DECnet node names to node addresses.
That's a small part of what DECdns aimed to do. The bigger part (and something that
"real" DNS still struggles with) was to provide a fault tolerant, distributed,
dynamically updated name-address mapping. At the time DECdns was designed, the Internet's
DNS was basically just a text file connected to a trivial daemon, with updates done by
sending new versions of those text files around. That was roughly the same level of
primitiveness that the DECnet Phase II through IV node name mappings had. DECdns
delivered a distributed database with automatic machinery for distributing updates
reliably.
However, your description and/or understanding of DNS seems to be very
weird. DNS have never been just a text file connected to a daemon. It
sounds like you are conflating DNS and the pre-DNS /etc/hosts (or
HOSTS.TXT) file, that was used in the early days. Which might match the
time frame of DECdns. The HOSTS.TXT file was not even connected to any
daemon. Your programs were expected to just read and parse the file
themselves, as needed. Or at least on the systems I know about. Exactly
how this worked could differ from one system to the next. But there
wasn't anything called "DNS" at that time.
DNS is distributed, with automatic updating of secondaries from
primaries. It is rather fault tolerant, and very scalable.
The one thing "lacking" have been an easy way of adding new information
programatically, while at the same time ensure security and data
validity. So you often still have the source of information for the
primary server being managed in a text file. But that file is not sent
around to other servers of the domain. DNS takes care of distribution
and replication itself.
This adding have become a larger issue over time, as people are
expecting to just plug in devices to the network, and then be able to
refer to them by some name that should pop into the local DNS server.
Johnny