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bluesky - RE: Naming via SDSI

bluesky AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: "Lucas Gonze" <lucas AT worldos.com>
  • To: "Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems" <bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: RE: Naming via SDSI
  • Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 14:37:02 -0500


My point here is to say that the need to see hashes instead of friendly names
can be limited to setup time. After setup you are either specifying a
namespace
(based on a chain of trust built out from the root server you have picked) or
using the implicit namespace of your root server. For example, your root
server
might only define four or five name/hash mappings.

It's interesting and probably even productive to work on whether it is a good
to
idea to have a system that permits collisions, but I don't mean to be
commenting
on that here. Whether your root server is your ISP or some other party is
also
a different set of issues. I am only addressing the problem of mapping
friendly
names to hashes.

> Well, in a sense trust does radiate outward from users in the
> DNS. The only reason the root servers have power is because of
> millions of users whose computers consult them to resolve names.
> See http://www.youcann.org/instructions.html for how to change your
> computer to consult different roots. If enough people did this, the
> current root servers would lose power.

But there's no way to specify the namespace within a domain reference.
Changing
the root provider has to be dynamic to be useful. Otherwise you just end up
with a different dictator. You could probably hack a solution at the OS level
already, at least in Linux...

Aside from the mammoth installed base, I don't see why DNS should remain the
one
true method for mapping friendly names to IPs. Not having white space or
punctuation is unnecessarily primitive. Having to have a dot anything is
fairly
silly as well. All the .foo means is the lookup source - there's no
conceptual
reason why these things should be mapped on a semantic level like com, biz,
aero, edu. That is just a historical artifact from the founding environment
of
DNS.

- Lucas








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