[address-policy-wg] Re: allocations to critical infrastructure

>They are, but they are not even using the amount of redundancy available
>by DNS today (read: "as many name servers as fit into a minimum sized
>UDP packet full of glue").  So there is hardly an argument for doing
>anycast.

I think that it is dangerous for a policy to force people to 
follow an evolutionary path when they implement technology. If it
is considered "best practice" for a DNS infrastructure to use
anycast then we should not penalize them because they jump there
from a more primitive state.

>The route servers use TCP, which will not work over anycast (in the
>general case - consider load balancing, every other packet going to 
>a different destination machine.  No problem for UDP, big problem
>for TCP)

It is also dangerous for a policy to punish people for 
evolving their technology. If it is considered "best practice"
to use anycast to publish critical infrastructure databases then
people should be able to change their services to enable them
to use UDP and anycast.

There are many ways in which a service could be adapted to anycast,
even a session-based service. There are also non-anycast ways to solve
this type of problem, such as peer-2-peer overlay networks, that could
still benefit from having a well-known address range as a rendezvous 
point.

I really don't think that the policy needs to be a close fit for 
a certain technical implementation. Instead it needs to express the
basic principle which is a non-technical principle. Then it can
provide a checklist which deal with technical questions. In the future
if the technical implementations change, it will be easier to add or
change checklist items if there is a solid principle underlying the 
policy.

--Michael Dillon