Advertising info services via the DNS

Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
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Date: Tue, 19 Apr 1994 21:42:06 --100
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From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
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Subject: Advertising info services via the DNS
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Hi, 

You may be familiar with the technique used by Netfind to locate white
pages services - by looking up TXT records in the DNS.  If not, see
ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/cs/distribs/netfind/Netfind.WP.URLs

I think this technique might be useful as a generic method for
advertising services, i.e. by putting the "official" URL for a service
into (say) the DNS entry for the server which provides it.  This info
may then easily be harvested by resource discovery systems.

Registering your service only requires the addition of a single line to
your DNS configuration, e.g.

  www             IN      CNAME   lust.mrrl.lut.ac.uk.
  lust            IN      A       158.125.220.7
                  IN      TXT     http://www.mrrl.lut.ac.uk/

and...

  # nslookup
  Default Server:  avarice.mrrl.lut.ac.uk
  Address:  158.125.220.8

  > set type=txt
  > www.mrrl.lut.ac.uk
  Server:  avarice.mrrl.lut.ac.uk
  Address:  158.125.220.8

  www.mrrl.lut.ac.uk      canonical name = lust.mrrl.lut.ac.uk
  lust.mrrl.lut.ac.uk     text = "http://www.mrrl.lut.ac.uk/"

There is scope for putting some more info in here, e.g. brief
description of server, admin contact, whether robots are
allowed/encouraged, ...  I think this is the province of the info
server, rather than the DNS

OK, what do you think of it so far?

Martin