As per Relevance of the word extensions, we have this rfc below:
Network Working Group R.
Request for Comments: 3197
Category: Informational November 2001
Applicability Statement for DNS MIB
Status of this
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of
memo is unlimited
Copyright
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved
This document explains why, after more than six years as
standards, the DNS Server and Resolver MIB extensions were
deployed, and recommends retiring these MIB extensions by moving
to Historical status
1.
The road to the DNS MIB extensions was paved with good intentions
In retrospect, it's obvious that the working group never had
agreement on what belonged in the MIB extensions, just that we
have some. This happened during the height of the craze for
extensions in virtually every protocol that the IETF was working
at the time, so the question of why we were doing this in the
place never got a lot of scrutiny. Very late in the
cycle we discovered that much of the support for writing the
extensions in the first place had come from people who wanted to
SNMP SET operations to update DNS zones on the fly. Examination
the security model involved, however, led us to conclude that
was not a good way to do dynamic update and that a separate
Dynamic Update protocol would be necessary
The MIB extensions started out being fairly specific to
particular DNS implementation (BIND-4.8.3); as work progressed,
BIND-specific portions were rewritten to be as implementation-
as we knew how to make them, but somehow every revision of the
extensions managed to create new counters that just happened
closely match statistics kept by some version of BIND. As a result
the MIB extensions ended up being much too big, which raised a
Austein Informational [Page 1]
RFC 3197 Applicability Statement - DNS MIB Extensions November 2001
of concerns with the network management directorate, but the
resisted every attempt to remove any of these variables. In the end
large portions of the MIB extensions were moved into optional
in an attempt to get the required subset down to a manageable size
The DNS Server and Resolver MIB extensions were one of the
attempts to write MIB extensions for a protocol usually considered
be at the application layer. Fairly early on it became clear that
while it was certainly possible to write MIB extensions for DNS,
SMI was not really designed with this sort of thing in mind. A
in point was the attempt to provide direct indexing into the
in the resolver MIB extensions: while arguably the only sane way
do this for a large cache, this required much more complex
clauses than is usual, and ended up running into known length
for object identifiers in some SNMP implementations
Furthermore, the lack of either real proxy MIB support in
managers or a standard subagent protocol meant that there was
reasonable way to implement the MIB extensions in the
implementation (BIND). When the AgentX subagent protocol
developed a few years later, we initially hoped that this
finally clear the way for an implementation of the DNS
extensions, but by the time AgentX was a viable protocol it
become clear that nobody really wanted to implement these
extensions
Finally, the MIB extensions took much too long to produce.
retrospect, this should have been a clear warning sign,
when the WG had clearly become so tired of the project that
authors found it impossible to elicit any comments whatsoever on
documents
2.
Observations based on the preceding list of mistakes, for the
of anyone else who ever attempts to write DNS MIB extensions again
- Define a clear set of goals before writing any MIB extensions
Know who the constituency is and make sure that what you
solves their problem
- Keep the MIB extensions short, and don't add variables
because somebody in the WG thinks they'd be a cool thing
measure
- If some portion of the task seems to be very hard to do within
SMI, that's a strong hint that SNMP is not the right tool
whatever it is that you're trying to do
Austein Informational [Page 2]
RFC 3197 Applicability Statement - DNS MIB Extensions November 2001
- If the entire project is taking too long, perhaps that's a
too
3.
In view of the community's apparent total lack of interest
deploying these MIB extensions, we recommend that RFCs 1611 and 1612
be reclassified as Historical documents
4. Security
Re-classifying an existing MIB document from Proposed Standard
Historic should not have any negative impact on security for
Internet
5. IANA
Getting rid of the DNS MIB extensions should not impose any new
on IANA
6.
The author would like to thank all the people who were involved
this project over the years for their optimism and patience
misguided though it may have been
7.
[DNS-SERVER-MIB] Austein, R. and J. Saperia, "DNS Server
Extensions", RFC 1611, May 1994.
[DNS-RESOLVER-MIB] Austein, R. and J. Saperia, "DNS Resolver
Extensions", RFC 1612, May 1994.
[DNS-DYNAMIC-UPDATE] Vixie, P., Thomson, S., Rekhter, Y. and J
Bound, "Dynamic Updates in the Domain
System (DNS UPDATE)", RFC 2136, April 1997.
[AGENTX] Daniele, M., Wijnen, B., Ellison, M., and D
Francisco, "Agent Extensibility (AgentX
Protocol Version 1", RFC 2741, January 2000.
Austein Informational [Page 3]
RFC 3197 Applicability Statement - DNS MIB Extensions November 2001
8. Author's
Rob
InterNetShare,
325M Sharon Park Drive, Suite 308
Menlo Park, CA 94025
EMail: sra@hactrn.
Austein Informational [Page 4]
RFC 3197 Applicability Statement - DNS MIB Extensions November 2001
9. Full Copyright
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved
This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished
others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain
or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied,
and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of
kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph
included on all such copies and derivative works. However,
document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by
the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or
Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose
developing Internet standards in which case the procedures
copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must
followed, or as required to translate it into languages other
English
The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not
revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns
This document and the information contained herein is provided on
"AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET
TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE
HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by
Internet Society
Austein Informational [Page 5]
if you see any problems within the linking, don't worry be happy,
this is version 0.1 of the Relevance System and you gotta expect some crappy subroutines sometimes,
just be content we did not write this in Java, which would have made this "bigger and better" HAHAHHA.
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