Representatives of Xirrus, Cisco and CheckPoint said they were interested in seeing this work go forward at the IETF.
'We would much rather put our development efforts into a standard protocol," said Aaron Smith, Director of Software, Applications and Services at Xirrus. "We are really heavy into the education market; nearly half of our engagements are in K-12 or higher ed. We're very interested in this kind of approach, especially if Multicast DNS would work better on Wi-Fi."
"I fully support this work," said Check Point Fellow Bob Hinden. "It's a real problem today. It's going to be worse with multiple subnets in the home."
Kerry Lynn from the IEEE outlined the requirements for a new standard that would fix MDNS
"We need to build something that's scalable, usable and deployable," Lynn said. "It needs to enable DNS-based service discovery across lots of links. It needs to work with both local and global use. And it needs to be scalable in terms of network traffic."
Thomas Narten, who works on Internet Technology and Strategy at IBM, led the discussion about creating an MDNSext working group. Narten said he expects the IETF to make progress on creating a standard fix to the Bonjour problem between now and when the IETF meets again in Orlando in March.
"There's a recognition of the problem and a willingness to work on it," Narten said. "We have to figure out how best to get to a solution. The universities are hurting; they're seeing this problem for real."
Read more about lan and wan in Network World's LAN & WAN section.
