Document: draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns-12
Reviewer: Ben Campbell
Review Date: 2010-11-23
IETF LC End Date: 2010-11-23
IESG Telechat date: (if known)

Summary: This draft is (probably) almost ready for publication, but I 
have several comments and questions that I think should be addressed prior 
to publication.

-- General Comment: 

I'm sure this has been hashed to death already given the age of this 
effort, and that this comment will be greeted with a collective groan, 
but I am rather surprised that an (effectively new) protocol with this much 
depth and implications appears to be being progressed as an AD-sponsored 
RFC rather than as a work group document. I guess this one is up to the 
IESG, and I won't object to whatever they choose to do--but I do think that 
this deserves rigorous review by lots of people more skilled in DNS 
arcana than I am.

*** Major issues:

None.

*** Minor issues:

-- Abstract, 2nd paragraph:

The annual fee part is not a technical issue. Seems like a bit of a straw 
man here.

-- 5.2, 2nd paragraph: "However, there are other DNS queries where more 
than one response is possible and useful, and for these queries a more 
advanced Multicast DNS client should include the ability to wait for 
an appropriate period of time to collect multiple responses"

How does a client know when it is useful to wait?

-- 6.2:

This section seems to create a lot of work to avoid redundant answers. Is 
it really worthwhile from a complexity vs efficiency trade-off?

-- ..., 2nd paragraph: "...it SHOULD delete that answer from the list 
of answers it is planning to give..."

The previous section had a MUST level requirement for the corresponding 
situation. Are they different on purpose?

-- 6.3:

Shouldn't there be something normative in section 6.3?

"Planning a query" is not well defined, and its likely a querier won't 
know it plans to send a query until time to send it. Is the querier 
expected to remember observed queries in case it might want to send 
a duplicate in the future?

-- 6.4, 1st paragraph: "...record is not less than the TTL this host 
would have given..."

Really? If the responder has a short TTL than another responder, should the 
first one really let the other increase the value?

-- section 7.6:

I assume this is for backwards compatibility with existing deployed 
implementations? If so, it would be worth mentioning that.?

-- 8.1, 4th paragraph: "250ms after the first query the host should send 
a second, then 250ms after that a third. If, by 250ms after the third 
probe, no conflicting Multicast DNS responses have been received, the 
host may move to the next step, announcing."

Normative?

-- 8.2, 2nd paragraph: "...the Authority Section must contain *all* the 
records ..."

Normative?

-- ..., 3rd paragraph: "The two records are compared and the 
lexicographically later data wins."

Seems like there might should be something normative there.

-- ..., last paragraph: "Note that it is vital..."

That would seem to imply something normative?

-- 8.3,  4th paragraph: "A Responder MAY send up to eight gratuitous 
Responses, provided that the interval between gratuitous responses increases 
by at least a factor of two with every response sent."

Why the option? When would a responder want to send more than two?

-- 8.4, 1st paragraph:

No need to repeat the probe?

-- 10, 1st paragraph: "As a general rule, the recommended TTL value..."

Normative?

-- ..., 3rd paragraph: "A client with an active outstanding query will 
issue a query packet when one or more of the resource record(s) in its 
cache is (are) 80% of the way to expiry."

What does an outstanding query have to do with it? Do you mean to say a 
cached record?

-- section 12, 3rd paragraph: "This characteristic is not unique to 
Multicast DNS. Although the original concept of DNS was a single global 
namespace, in recent years split views, firewalls, intranets, and the 
like have increasingly meant that the answer to a given DNS query has 
become dependent on the location of the querier."

I don't think this is a fair comparison, as it was not the intent of 
the protocol designers for dns to be location specific, and many would 
consider this an abuse of the protocol. OTOH, m-dns is, if I 
understand correctly, is _intended_ to be location specific.

-- ..., 6th paragraph: "There are no NS records anywhere in Multicast DNS 
Domains."

Normative?

-- 14, 1st paragraph: "The option to fail-over to Multicast DNS for names 
not ending in ".local." SHOULD be a user-configured option, and SHOULD be 
disabled by default because of the possible security issues related to 
unintended local resolution of apparently global names."

I have trouble imagining any safe circumstance to enable this. Can you 
offer an example?

-- 15, 5th paragraph: "While this kind of name duplication should be rare,..."

Why should it be rare?

-- 17, paragraph 1:

How does this historical note relate to IDNA? Do you mean to say that 
IDNA is not needed for mdns? It would be nice to have some consistency here.

-- ..., last paragraph

If a CNAME record creates a name conflict, will m-dns implementations notice 
and defend against it?

-- 18, paragraph 3: "... specialized cases where the implementer knows that 
all receivers implement reassembly."

How could an implementor know this? Can you list some example cases? It 
seems to me that, unless we know of such cases in advance, it might be 
better to just forbid this.

-- ..., last paragraph:

If jumbo packets are rare,  why not just stick to the 1500 limit?

-- 19.1, paragraphs 1 and 2:

The first two paragraphs seem to make normative statements that are redundant 
with the rest of the document. It's best to either state this 
descriptively, or clearly attribute the requirements to the authoritative 
sections. Otherwise if there is a conflict, it may not be clear to 
the reader which text is authoritative.

-- 19.14, paragraph 5: "Until future IETF Standards Action specifying that 
names in the rdata of other types should be compressed, names that appear 
within the rdata of any type not listed above MUST NOT be compressed."

Is this a new normative requirement, or a restatement of some existing DNS 
rule that could be referenced?

-- 22, paragraph 3: "In an environment where there is a group of cooperating 
participants, but there may be other antagonistic participants on the same 
physical link,..."

I think the sense of this should be more along the lines of "in all 
environments where clients cannot be sure in advance that no antagonistic 
hosts can exist on the same segment" or something to that effect. Too 
many network managers naively believe that no hostile devices can exist on 
their networks.

-- ..., paragraph 4: "... it is *especially* important..."

Normative?

-- 23, paragraph 4:

This section needs to request registration of an explicit new IANA table 
along with the criteria for adding new entries, or explicitly reference 
an existing registry, then register the entries. Don't expect IANA to 
infer this. Also, is suspect language like "IANA should" would br 
better stated as "this document requests IANA to register..."

-- ..., numbered list:

Are you asking IANA to do something with the information about special 
treatment of the multicast domains? That level of detail would be unusual in 
an IANA registry--more likely they would just reference this document for 
details. If you aren't asking them for specific action about this 
information, then it should go elsewhere in the document.

-- ..., list item 1, 2nd paragraph:

I'm very skeptical about normative statements of the form of "users SHOULD 
be aware...". What should _implementors_ do?

-- ..., list items 4-7:

These seem to put requirements on devices that do not implement this 
spec. Why would the implementors of such even read this?

-- ..., 2nd to last paragraph:

Again, this needs to be more explicit about what is requested from IANA.

--, 25.2, "[B4W]" reference:

Is it reasonable to reference something as ephemeral as wikipedia, even for an 
informative reference? Remember RFCs live a long time.

-- Appendix A:

Please describe the conclusions, not just the arguments.


*** Nits/editorial comments:

-- Idnits shows 2 warnings and 3 comments. Please check.

-- general:

I would like to have seen some general, non-normative, discussion on how 
this all works together before jumping deep into protocol details. I was 
fairly well into the document before I understood the transaction-stateless 
nature of the mechanism.

-- 5.3, 5th paragraph: "To perform this cache maintenance, a Multicast DNS 
Querier should plan to re-query for records after at least 50% of the 
record lifetime has elapsed. This document recommends the following specific 
strategy:"

It might be helpful to include a note about the difference between 
retransmitting a query vs re-querying.

-- Section 7:

This section needs some subsections, or other organization. As it is, it 
jumps from one topic to the next with little transition and is hard to follow.

-- ..., 2nd paragraph: "The record name must match the question name, 
the record rrtype must match the question qtype unless the qtype is "ANY" 
(255) or the rrtype is "CNAME" (5), and the record rrclass must match the 
question qclass unless the qclass is "ANY""

References? Also, should the musts here be normative?

--... 5th paragraph: "A Multicast DNS Responder on Ethernet [IEEE.802.3] 
and similar shared multiple access networks..."

Do you expect responders to vary behavior depending on the underlying 
network type?

-- ..., later same paragraph: "...determined by the rules described below."

The way things are organized, it's hard to tell where the referenced rules 
start and stop.

-- 7.1, 5th paragraph from end: "For example, the TTL for address records 
in Multicast DNS is typically 120 seconds, so the negative cache lifetime 
for an address record that does not exist should also be 120 seconds."

Reference?

-- ..., 4th paragraph from end: "name/rrtype/rrclass"

Please avoid using a slash as a conjunction substitute.

"(e.g. for reverse address..."

For, or From?

-- section 7.3, last paragraph: "...SHOULD be randomly delayed in the 
range 20-120ms, or 400- 500ms if the TC (truncated) bit is set, as 
described above."

Isn't this redundant with previous sections?

-- 8.1, 6th paragraph: "At the present time, this document recommends..."

Do you expect this to change?

-- 8.2, 4th paragraph:

Inconsistent usage between "the host" and "ourself". Probably best not to 
anthropomorphize.

-- 8.2.1:

Inconsistent section hierarchy. The single record case was in the parent 
section, but the multiple level case has its own subsection.

-- 8.3, 1st paragrah: "gratuitous"

That seems the wrong choice of words, since such responses are not 
"without cause or reason" which is the usual dictionary definition. 
Maybe "unsolicited"? (No problem if this is some DNS term of art that 
I haven't heard.)

-- ..., last paragraph: "as described below in "Conflict Resolution"."

Section number cross-references would be helpful.

-- 9, indented paragraph after numbered list item 5:

It's not clear to me if this is supposed to refer to just item 5, or to 
item 4 and 5. In any case, the advise that one may simply not notify does 
not seem helpful for case 5.

-- 11, 1st paragraph: "These older clients discard all packets with TTLs other 
than 255."

Can you provide a reference for this behavior? How old is old?

-- 12, 4th paragraph: "The IPv4 name server for a Multicast DNS Domain 
is 224.0.0.251. The IPv6 name server for a Multicast DNS Domain is FF02::FB."

Name server _address_?

-- ..., 6th paragraph: "...delegation of all Multicast DNS Domains to 
the 224.0.0.251:5353 and [FF02::FB]:5353,..."

Missing words?

-- ..., 7th paragraph:

Please expand SOA on first mention

-- 15, last paragraph:

Can you provide section cross references for these safeguards?

-- 13:

Seems like this should be stated early in the document, in the intro, or 
in a scope section or applicability statement.

-- 16.3: "...each have their own..."

its own

-- 17, 3rd paragraph from end:

This seems to imply there are no "letters" in UTF8 outside the ASCII range. 

-- ..., last paragraph: "The simple rules for case-insensitivity in Unicast 
DNS also apply..."

Reference?

-- 18, paragraph 3: "...,a Multicast DNS Responder SHOULD send the 
Resource Record alone, in a single IP datagram, sent using multiple IP 
fragments."

I have trouble parsing this clause. Should "sent using" just be "using"?

-- ..., 2nd to last paragraph: "Ethernet "Jumbo" packet"

Reference?

-- 19.2 and 19.3:

Incomplete sentences

-- 19.12 and 19.13:

References to normative text?

-- 20, paragraph 1: "The value of Multicast DNS is..."

Is assume you mean "a value..." or "one value..."?

-- 23, paragraphs 1 and 2:

Can you provide references or pointer to the existing registrations?