RFC 3197 (rfc3197) - Page 1 of 5

Applicability Statement for DNS MIB Extensions

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Network Working Group                                         R. Austein
Request for Comments: 3197                                 InterNetShare
Category: Informational                                    November 2001


             Applicability Statement for DNS MIB Extensions

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This document explains why, after more than six years as proposed
   standards, the DNS Server and Resolver MIB extensions were never
   deployed, and recommends retiring these MIB extensions by moving them
   to Historical status.

1. History

   The road to the DNS MIB extensions was paved with good intentions.

   In retrospect, it's obvious that the working group never had much
   agreement on what belonged in the MIB extensions, just that we should
   have some.  This happened during the height of the craze for MIB
   extensions in virtually every protocol that the IETF was working on
   at the time, so the question of why we were doing this in the first
   place never got a lot of scrutiny.  Very late in the development
   cycle we discovered that much of the support for writing the MIB
   extensions in the first place had come from people who wanted to use
   SNMP SET operations to update DNS zones on the fly.  Examination of
   the security model involved, however, led us to conclude that this
   was not a good way to do dynamic update and that a separate DNS
   Dynamic Update protocol would be necessary.

   The MIB extensions started out being fairly specific to one
   particular DNS implementation (BIND-4.8.3); as work progressed, the
   BIND-specific portions were rewritten to be as implementation-neutral
   as we knew how to make them, but somehow every revision of the MIB
   extensions managed to create new counters that just happened to
   closely match statistics kept by some version of BIND.  As a result,
   the MIB extensions ended up being much too big, which raised a number



Austein                      Informational
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