by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/10/25 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/10/25/10229790.aspx
Previous parts in this series:
I have a T-shirt with the caption:
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
which is kind of fun, and a nice way to help distinguish geeks in some situations.
It makes the topic today even more topical, which I guess just makes it a better topic?
The limitations I mentioned in Part 10 above related to the way the hope of Unicode support in DNS is dashed by the requirements that NetBIOS, and more to the point the way the DNS and NetBIOS names are kept in sync by a convention that many people depend on.
That limitation is a pretty bitter one, since the whole point of IDN is really to allow names that support a significant chunk of Unicode, yet the "default" name for just about everything you might do with a machine is largely kept in the world of code pages.
That's ugly.
Moving forward, it is easy to assume that backcompat requirements will keep the situation from ever changing.
Thankfully that assumption ignores the one way we can make sure we can get out from under Microsoft's implementation of NetBIOS's ugly limitations.
IPv6
(gratuitous embedding of the song performed by the secret-wg in the closing plenary of the RIPE 55 conference follows)
There is one very cool thing about IPv6.
Well actually, there are a buttload of cool things about IPv6, but most of those things aren't relevant to this Blog and only one is relevant to this blog.
It is the fact that the standard defines no direct relationship to NBT, aka NetBIOS over TCP/IP, aka NetBIOS.
So, in a pure IPv6 world, unless Microsoft specifically adds such a relationship, and thereby snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, an IPv6 only world is a DNS only world.
And thus an IPv6 only machine does not need to run NetBIOS -- or at least not connect the two together.
And the machine name no longer has to be dependent on the default system locale, or more specifically the CP_OEMCP.
Now there's "many a slip twixt a cup and a lip", as they say.
But one of the new commitments I will now have as a part of my larger IDN responsibilities is to make sure no one adds back that dependency....
Raymond on 25 Oct 2011 7:22 AM:
Who are you kidding? You know that eventually, some corporation is going to say "We require NetBIOS support in IPv6, and we demand that you implement it."
Michael S. Kaplan on 25 Oct 2011 7:29 AM:
What can I say? I have high hopes that they'll take tha route AD has for compat mode vs. not....
cheong00 on 25 Oct 2011 7:42 AM:
Awesome song.
Bonue point for "(those silent will be shot)" remark at the third chrous.
ROFL!!!
cheong00 on 25 Oct 2011 7:48 AM:
Actually I'd also think that there will be request for punycode support on NetBIOS. Afterall that is the standard our government is pushing in DNS resolution in Chinese region to solve the CHT/CHS domain name problem.
It's only logical to have servers match their names with the name be seen on the internet. :P
John Cowan on 25 Oct 2011 8:17 AM:
"Gratuitous"? Hardly. One of the best things you've ever linked to, I'd say.
Michael S. Kaplan on 25 Oct 2011 10:31 AM:
Gratuitous because it was orthogonal to the central point of the blog itself, not because it wasn't cool!
Stuart on 25 Oct 2011 11:34 AM:
::1 and 127.0.0.1 are distinguishable in other ways too... we're using IIS6 for SMTP (because our system administrator hasn't figured out how to do the equivalent in IIS7 or what the supported replacement is yet) and when you tell it to enable routing it only accepts an IPv4 address. If you are trying to use "localhost" as your SMTP server, you can get in trouble when Windows Update decides to make localhost resolve to ::1 instead of 127.0.0.1...
cheong00 on 25 Oct 2011 6:30 PM:
@Stuart: I think I've seen standalone SMTP server in Windows Component selection menu (the same place where you add the telnet client back). It's required to install that component before Exchange Server installation can continue.
You may want to ask your system admin to check again.
referenced by
2013/10/17 There's no "I" in IDN, part 19: There's no "I" in IPv6, either!
2013/10/08 There's no "I" in IDN, part 18: There isn't even an "I" in John C. Klensin's name!
2013/09/13 There's no "I" in IDN, part 17: EAI made it to China, and everybody knows it!
2013/04/19 There's no "I" in IDN, part 16: It's a good thing they decided to call it EAI!
2012/10/12 There's no "I" in IDN, part 15: Still no 'I' in EAI.... but we could use an US sometime soon!
2012/08/08 There's no "I" in IDN, part 14: It turns out there's no "I" in IE, either
2012/05/18 There's no "I" in IDN, part 13: Desktop and Managed and Metro; oh my!
2012/02/27 There's no "I" in IDN, part 12: Emoji + IDN == U+1F4A9 (PILE OF POO)