# Re: Finding URN->URL servers

Keith Moore (moore@cs.utk.edu)
Wed, 16 Feb 1994 17:18:41 -0500

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    Message-Id: <199402162218.RAA10215@wilma.cs.utk.edu>

    From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>

    To: Martin Hamilton <M.T.Hamilton@lut.ac.uk>

    Subject: Re: Finding URN->URL servers

    In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 16 Feb 1994 21:10:04 GMT."

                 <199402162110.VAA08691@lust.mrrl.lut.ac.uk>

    Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 17:18:41 -0500

> How about if we take a leaf from Netfind, and use DNS TXT records (or
> a to-be-defined Uniform Resource Record :-) to hold the URLs of servers
> willing to resolve URNs, e.g.
>
> foo IN TXT "http://www.xyz.com/cgi-bin/urn-to-url/"
> IN TXT "gopher://gopher.xyz.com/7/conv/urn-lookup"
>
> This assumes a URN with (at least!) two components - one which is
> eventually mapped to a domain (cf. foo above), and one which is
> passed to whatever server your client thinks it can talk to!

I think it's a good idea to use DNS to find a URN->URL server, but I don't
think we need lots of different protocols to do this once we have the server.
(At least not in the short term...)

Why don't we just use whois++ for this purpose? Then we can just register
a URN.ORG root and use ordinary A records:

underground.URN.ORG IN A server1.underground.com
IN A server2.underground.com
IN A server3.underground.com

would say, to look up a URN of the form URN:::::::underground:something, talk
to the whois++ server on that machine, and ask it for some locations for that
particular URN.

This would let clients use a well-defined library routine (gethostbyname)
instead of writing additional code.

I could live with TXT records, but I see them as just a barrier to getting
the first implementations running. We could always use them later to
accomodate additional protocols.

Keith

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- Reply: Martin Hamilton: "Re: Finding URN->URL servers"