Nottingham: Internet protocols are changing

Posted Dec 13, 2017 10:59 UTC (Wed) by buchanmilne (guest, #42315)
In reply to: Nottingham: Internet protocols are changing by epa
Parent article: Nottingham: Internet protocols are changing

The URI specification should allow the hostname to be given as both IP address and name at the same time. https://{google.com:172.217.23.46:ZLgE36lVHk}/ where the last bit is some cryptographic signature from the original nameserver (so if you trust that nameserver with DNSSEC, you will trust that the new name/address pair seen in the URI is correct). That would reduce round trips still further.

But now you've made the experience worse for everyone for whom the best Google PoP or Edge PoP (and of course any other CDN) isn't the same as yours. For example, for me, google.com is one of 6 addresses in 108.177.119/24, but from home it's a totally different range. For people who live 500ms away from you on a slow-ish link (e.g < 1Mbps), this could be the difference between the internet working, and not working (e.g. Youtube doesn't play, Netflix doesn't work, Google images take forever to load, Android App Updates fail).

Nottingham: Internet protocols are changing

Posted Dec 13, 2017 14:21 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

I agree, and perhaps google.com was not the best example. It would make more sense to use it only for hostnames that resolve to a single IP address (or a round-robin set where the particular one to use is arbitrary). Or else to extend it to list multiple addresses separated by commas.

I envisaged that if your machine already has a cached IP address for that hostname, you use that as normal. Only if you don't currently have the hostname resolved would you have the option of saving a round trip (or bypassing hostile DNS blocking) by using the address embedded in the URI.

Nottingham: Internet protocols are changing

Posted Jan 8, 2018 0:55 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

To mitigate that, either the client could look up the host itself and validate the result using a key encode in the URL -or it could just ask the server at the specified IP whether there's a better IP (distributed DNS?).

Nottingham: Internet protocols are changing

Posted Jan 18, 2018 2:32 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

This whole line of logic is going a bit off course, but there *is* a mechanism for suggesting different servers to clients (the Alt-Svc HTTP header, fairly recent addition too).