Re: Traffic Analysis and Namespace Dereferencing

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Miles Sabin <MSabin@interx.com> was heard to say:
| Norman Walsh wrote,
| > The local caching seems to be part of the problem. I make 
| > extensive use of OASIS Catalogs on my own system to map public 
| > identifers (and a few system identifiers) to local copies.
| 
| Ahh, but that _is_ a cache ... a manually maintained one.

Yes, I realize that.

| Sorry, maybe I didn't make it all that clear that I meant 'cache'
| in a rather broader sense that 'HTTP caching proxy server'.

I know that, too :-)

| What requires more skill than what? Designing and implementing
| a (good) proxy is non-trivial; installing and configuring one is
| quite a bit easier. Writing a catalog file is easy; manually
| maintaining one could be quite a headache (cp. host files vs.
| DNS).

In practice, I don't think maintaining a catalog file is a headache at
all. I suppose a proxy would be more transparent in some ways, but
I think installing and maintaining one would be quite tricky for most
people.

For one thing, a simple LIFO proxy isn't sufficient. You'd need to be
able to tailor it in some way so that different classes of entries
never expire from the cache.

| Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of the work that you and
| the OASIS Entity Management TC are doing. But for me that's only
| a very partial solution to a much bigger problem ... it's a host
| file, I want DNS.

And I don't oppose a broader solution. :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@East.Sun.COM | Simplicity is always a virtue.--Edward Abbey
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