From: jim@ferkel.ucsb.edu (Jim Lick)
Subject: Re: Registering a New Site
Keywords: maps uucp Internet
Organization: University of California, Santa Barbara
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 05:55:04 GMT

In <1992Aug19.230206.18099@cosy.sbg.ac.at> lendl@cosy.sbg.ac.at  (Otmar Lendl) writes:
>Another idea is to utilize the Domain-name-system of the Internet.
>IMHO it's a pity that there is no LOCATION Resource-Record 
>defined in the DNS (yet), it would be really nice doing a 
>traceroute and see the hops light up on a global map.
>Meanwhile one could use the TXT RR. Here is the description from
>RFC 1035:
>>3.3.14. TXT RDATA format
>>
>>     +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
>>     /                   TXT-DATA                    /
>>     +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
>> 
>> where:
>> 
>> TXT-DATA        One or more <character-string>s.
>> 
>> TXT RRs are used to hold descriptive text.  The semantics of the text
>> depends on the domain where it is found.
>> 
>This looks like a perfectly legal and simple way to make the 
>location information available for all Usenet sites with a FQDN.
>In my case I'd add the following line to my named files:
>cosy.sbg.ac.at.   IN   TXT   "47 49 N / 013 05 E city"

>Comments ?

Overall, this is a very good idea.  However, there are still some problems.
First off, TXT RRs are a new addition to the DNS spec.  As such, quite a
lot of software doesn't support it.  A quick check shows that the nslookup
shipped with SVR4 and SunOS 4.1.1 both don't support the TXT RR type.  If
you try to set querytype=TXT it won't let you, and if you use querytype=ANY
it will print out "???" for each TXT record it receives.  I just installed
bind 4.8.3 on my SVR4 system a couple of days and <arpa/nameser.h> on the
system didn't even have the define for T_TXT, so I had to add it to get
bind to compile.  I doubt that most named's shipped support TXT RRs either.
Vendors are content to ship years-old versions of software as long as it
works good enough, so I don't see this changing all that soon.

Next, you can have multiple TXT RRs, so we should add tags at the start of
each one so that we know what it is, e.g.:
cosy.sbg.ac.at.   IN   TXT   "Location: 47 49 N / 013 05 E city"

Then we could have lots of different comments we could put in like City,
State, Owner's name, etc.  Grab the entry for 'jingoro.tcp.com' for some
example fields I came up with.  I don't have Location since I don't
know my lat/long here.

I think it would be a good idea to write up some semi-standard TXT field
tags and then maybe even write up an RFC for them so they would be official.
That would at least get things established.  Then it is a matter of whether
people actually use them.  Heck, many sites don't even use the HINFO field.
Another option is to add yet more resource record types.  I doubt that support
for new types would happen very quickly though...  The TXT type has no
specific purpose, so it doesn't seem like using it for this purpose would
be much of a kludge.

Despite the drawbacks I've outlined, I still think it's a good idea, and
worth pursuing.

Additional comments?

                            Jim Lick		       
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