Point domain name of my zone to name in somebody else's zone?

[Sam Wilson]

In article <mailman.212.1399660752.26362.bind-users at lists.isc.org>,
 Kevin Darcy <kcd at chrysler.com> wrote:

> On 5/9/2014 6:59 AM, Tony Finch wrote:
> > Dave Warren <davew at hireahit.com> wrote:
> >> I actually think that MX records were a boneheaded thing to do, had email
> >> started using SRV records in the first place we might be in a position now
> >> where using SRV records is the defacto standard if not the actual standard 
> >> for
> >> all services. (No offense to the folks that made MX records happen, I 
> >> realize
> >> that in historical context it was the correct decision and it solved the 
> >> very
> >> immediate problem -- I'm just saying that in an ideal world, SRV records
> >> instead of MX records would solved the same problem in a more generic 
> >> fashion,
> >> and would have pushed us to a better place for other protocols)
> > It is interesting to look at the old RFCs and see how many false starts it
> > took to get to the MX design. Mail was the first heavily virtualized
> > application so I think their failure to generalize was forgivable,
> > especially since they were also dealing with the massive problem of
> > gatewaying between dozens of balkanized mail networks.
> >
> > http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/documents/JANET-Mail
> > -Gateways.ps
> >
> Indeed. Hindsight is 20/20. Mail was the "killer app" for the early 
> Internet, and providing a way to route it over the Internet, with 
> automatic load-balancing and failover, was a major achievement. Sure, 
> the IETF could have spent a few more years coming up with a "generic" 
> way to do things, throwing in -- as SRV eventually did -- port 
> reassignment, weighting and namespace semantics, but how much would that 
> delay have stunted the growth of the nascent technology? Maybe it would 
> have resulted in OSI/X.400 surpassing SMTP as the predominant mail 
> transport, and we'd all be *miserable*.

Actually some of us who were already using a more sophisticated naming 
scheme[1] were disappointed that the DNS was really only a replacement 
for HOSTS.TXT.  That was one of the few downsides of joining the 
Internet.

Sam

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS> 3rd paragraph

-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.