Re: DNS and Mosaic

jallard@microsoft.com
From: jallard@microsoft.com
Message-id: <9310020129.AA01830@netmail.microsoft.com>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: DNS and Mosaic
Date: Fri, 01 Oct 93 17:45:20 
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 1743      

Andy> Well my first reaction is don't do it, because any Administrator 
Andy> who doesn't run DNS so it caches  addresses is just asking for 
Andy> performance problems. We, for example, connect to the internet 
Andy> through a 14.4K modem, it's pretty slow. Hostname lookups, 
Andy> however, aren't one of our problems since one machine on the local 
Andy> LAN caches address lookups. It's the Administrator's job to 
Andy> resolve log-jams like this, at least that's my philosophy. 

you're making a couple of assumptions that might not be valid for all 
environments: 

a) the dns services available to a user are administered by their 
organization

b) the local dns services implement their own caching scheme.

in tommorow's world of dialup/isdn/cable from-the-home internet 
connectivity assertion (a) fails. as for (b), many smaller organizations 
run pc-based dns servers which generally do not cache, frequently 
referring rather than recursing queries.

that said, i would think that it wouldn't be the end of the world if a 
client could choose to postpend www hostname resolution results in their 
/etc/hosts (or equivalent hosttable store) if said option was enabled. 
in fact, some people might think it was nice.

a good place to ask this question might be comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc, 
where some of the less powerful hostname resolution schemes are better 
understood.

_______________________________________________________________
J. Allard                                 jallard@microsoft.com
Program Manager of TCP/IP Technologies    work: (206)882-8080
Microsoft Corporation                     home: (206)860-8862