Applicability Statement for DNS MIB Extensions

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. 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 [Page 1]