Domain Experts?

[Peter A Clitherow <pc@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM>]

To: slug@ai.sri.com
Subject: Domain Experts?
--Text follows this line--
>From:  ray@cme.nist.gov (Steve Ray)
;I tried to get our Symbolics to function as a domain server about a
;year ago, also with little success. At this point, I would like in
;particular to hear how anyone can get the Symbolics to be updated from
;some other domain server, running on a Unix box. We have over 50 Suns
;on our network, and I don't like the idea of manually having to add
;them to our namspace.

I think it's generally agreed that the symbolics domain server needs
some work.  Here's what we've found:

We are an internet site with some 2000 machines about 1200 of which are
in the .bellcore.com domain.

We have a "local" ethernet (actually several) with a fair number of
machines (mostly SUNs) in the .ctt.bellcore.com domain.  I also baulked
at having to add all these, so to keep things clean, i created a
subdomain of ctt for the LISPMs to live in.  Now the problems:

The domain server treats everything in its namespace as belonging to the
specified internet domain name of the site, regardless of any name
specified by an individual host.

The resolver (not the server) fails, if it can get A, HINFO but no WKS
data for instance.  unfortunately, not everyone you might wish to talk
to puts HINFO and WKS data in the domain server.

As you point out, the server is weak on returning MX records (it should
return a list of the local LISPMs with the mailer running for instance).

If it's not in the namespace, the domain server will return
non-existant.  That is, EVERYTHING has to be in the namespace for the
domain server to acknowledge the existance of it.

[Domain resolver complaint] {sys:network;host.lisp problem}.  There
should be a way to specify alternate domain suffixes to resolve.  e.g.
first try the domain specified in the namespace site object, then some
alternates to resolve names.  This avoids having to specify
"riverside.scrc.symbolics.com" each time.  If "scrc.symbolics.com" were
on a list of alternate domain suffixes...

Recently, our domain server has started having catastrophic failures.
e..g dumped into the cold load stream, caused by some strange domain
requests coming in - they seem to cause the TCP process to go into a
loop, and the scheduler crashes.  This is most myserious, and symbolics
have no solution yet, but seems to underline the point that the domain
stuff needs work.

Last i heard was that the domains were to be worked on this last summer.
Perhaps that means that in release 8.0 things will be a little more
stable?

pc