On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 04:08:05PM -0000, Rob Golding wrote:
Indeed, in fact as the resolver method is more reliable, more accurate, faster, necessary and so on - why are we duplicating it in WHOIS at all ?!?
Because it's not duplicate data. The RDS tells you what the registration system thinks, not what the DNS thinks. The two systems _ought_ to have the same data, but that can only be checked by looking at both. (This is also, note, the reason that a "centralized" system that holds all the data for all registries is as astonishingly bad idea, because it creates yet a new data sync problem that cannot be checked.) When things break, one thing any competent network admin does is check the DNS to make sure something isn't wrong. If that doesn't seem broken, one immediately checks whois/RDDS to see whether what's in the DNS is what's _supposed_ to be there. I admit to being a newbie to the Internet, since I didn't join it until some time in the 1990s, but as near as I can tell this is what people have _always_ done to diagonose problems. A distributed database system with a lot of caching benefits from an independent way to check that it is working correctly, so that diagnosis from the far-flung edges of the network need not require everyone checking with a central authority all the time. Having an RDS is useful for making that work reliably. The Internet has been the success it is because of this distributed nature, and I think it is jaw-droppingly ridiculous that we continue to debate whether that is something we want to maintain. There are lots of other uses of the current whois system that I think are bogus (I think, for instance, that the encroachment of intellectual property claims on the DNS has been an unmitigated disaster for the Internet). But this technical use is the basic point of the RDS facility, and I think it is plainly useful. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com