A New Generation of Namespaces ?

Part I : Brief Technical Introduction to Classes

Brainstorming Workshop
Next Generation Namespace Infrastructure

18 Septembre 2009
11:00 - 13:00 ; 15:00 - 16:30 ITU Headquarters, Room G1



Francis MUGUET
Legal Notice: Observations and opinions expressed in this presentation are not meant to represent official views of any institution, association, company or whatever entity.





Introduction to class namespaces



Current DNS system = naming tool available for networks other than the Internet
Historical examples : Chaosnet , Hesiod never under the governance of IETF or ICANN.
Implemented with a parameter named class defined by the RFC 5395 superseding RFC 2929.
Each class = autonomous namespace / own DNS root servers / own governance.
The Internet => class "IN" / namespace managed by ICANN.
Chaosnet => class "CH" , Hesiod => class "HS".
there are up to 65,000 classes available and unused.









PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS



In the 90's, another approach to competition = alternative DNS roots
but operating within the IN class => a fragmented namespace.
Therefore in 2001, ICANN recommended the use of classes
Alternative DNS roots = commercial and technical failures.







CLASS ASSIGNEMENT



Requests for Comments (RFCs) managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ,
RFC 5395 ( superseding RFC 2929 ) => classes.
IN, CH, HS classes and 256 classes for "private use"
the other 65,000 classes not yet assigned, may be assigned by "IETF consensus".
If IETF were to decide to block classes assignments ?
=> Questions :
IETF , whose governance sphere = the Internet, entitled to assign classes ?.
Under international public law, governance and arbitrage between networks => responsibility of ITU ?






IMPLEMENTATION



For a class to be usable in practice, => DNS clients or "resolvers" as well as servers must comply fully with RFC 5395
Most DNS clients and servers do not implement completely the RFCs, including RFC 2929.
The field class is often considered as a fixed value with IN.
Software clients and servers => be updated => class = true variable.
No particular technical conceptual difficulty.
No namespace fragmentation. Users may use, at the same time, different classes
because supported by the same DNS servers ( except for the root servers )









ROOT ZONE FILES



The root servers for each class are indicated in the so-called DNS cache " file used by each DNS server.

This file is usually distributed with each DNS software. The official version may be downloaded from InterNIC 

	
      This file holds the information on root name servers needed to
      ;       initialize cache of Internet domain name servers
      ;       (e.g. reference this file in the "cache  .  "
      ;       configuration file of BIND domain name servers).
      ;
      ;       This file is made available by InterNIC 
      ;       under anonymous FTP as
      ;           file                /domain/named.root
      ;           on server           FTP.INTERNIC.NET
      ;       -OR-                    RS.INTERNIC.NET
      ;
      ;       last update:    Dec 12, 2008
      ;       related version of root zone:   2008121200
      ;
      ; formerly NS.INTERNIC.NET
      ;
      .                        3600000 IN  NS    A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
      A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.      3600000      A     198.41.0.4
      A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.      3600000      AAAA  2001:503:BA3E::2:30








IN PRACTICE

    Indicate the class with an extra field in front of the domain name.
    Suggested syntax = class% placed in front of the domain name.
    Eg: class 4d (corresponding to Net4D) , CT class (corresponding to the Cyrillic network Сеть => URLs:

    http://4d%fr.wikipedia.open
    http://ст%Москва.ро .

    In current browsers, no need to type http:// => typing ст%Москва.ро suffices.
    a person writing only Cyrillic, => class CT = class by default
    => need only type Москва.ро, without any ASCII letters.