Is 'behaviour not intended by the original rfc' your definition of 'broken'?
Nope.
But the main question is, if this is "broken.", please elaborate what exactly "breaks."
I take it that unless I can point to some specific situation in which some specific application or user community is negatively impacted by this, you'll go on assuming that this deviant behaviour is merely an exercise in creativity. In that case, discussion would be pointless. If that's not the case, though, consider that a correct implementation of DNS would be within its rights to take note of the "same serial number but incoherent answers" condition and declare the zone unreachable. I'm not saying that BIND will ever do this (nor that it won't!), but I will say that I wish it had done this all along, since this is not by far the only erroneous configuration that such logic would have detected. It's possible that DNSSEC, if deployed, will cause these erroneous configurations to be detected and properly dealt with. If you're doing something that a correct implementation (which merely happens not to exist yet) could correctly treat as an error, then what you're doing fits my definition of "broken." If you think that the protocol specification is simply out of date and needs to take account of this kind of intentional incoherence, then you are welcome to try updating it. DNS is a distributed, autonomous, reliable, coherent database -- not a mapping service. DNS is about fact, not value -- it's about mechanism, not policy. No matter how you slice it, intentionally incoherent DNS zones are "broken."
On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 08:32:19PM -0700, Paul Vixie wrote:
But the main question is, if this is "broken.", please elaborate what exactly "breaks."
I take it that unless I can point to some specific situation in which some specific application or user community is negatively impacted by this, you'll go on assuming that this deviant behaviour is merely an exercise in creativity.
The way to go about this is to see if breaking existing practice will break current implementations and plausible future implementations.
If that's not the case, though, consider that a correct implementation of DNS would be within its rights to take note of the "same serial number but incoherent answers" condition and declare the zone unreachable. I'm not
Would be pretty silly, and overstepping the robustness principle.
DNS is about fact, not value -- it's about mechanism, not policy.
No matter how you slice it, intentionally incoherent DNS zones are "broken."
So by your logic, by making sure that the serial numbers never match, we would 'unbreak' the situation? Seems like a step in the wrong direction. Regards, bert -- http://www.PowerDNS.com Versatile DNS Software & Services Trilab The Technology People Netherlabs BV / Rent-a-Nerd.nl - Nerd Available - 'SYN! .. SYN|ACK! .. ACK!' - the mating call of the internet
I take it that unless I can point to some specific situation in which some specific application or user community is negatively impacted by this, you'll go on assuming that this deviant behaviour is merely an exercise in creativity. The way to go about this is to see if breaking existing practice will break current implementations and plausible future implementations.
we call it 'architecture' when we can see it won't work from flaws in the design. we call it a stupid mess when we test a broken design because we lack architectural judgement. randy
On Sun, 7 Oct 2001, Randy Bush wrote:
I take it that unless I can point to some specific situation in which some specific application or user community is negatively impacted by this, you'll go on assuming that this deviant behaviour is merely an exercise in creativity. The way to go about this is to see if breaking existing practice will break current implementations and plausible future implementations.
we call it 'architecture' when we can see it won't work from flaws in the design. we call it a stupid mess when we test a broken design because we lack architectural judgement.
Ahh, and you're the one deciding if conversation is allowed to happen and what specifically is said on the list Paul keeps mentioning to discuss DNS evolution? No thanks.
participants (4)
-
bert hubert
-
Patrick Greenwell
-
Paul Vixie
-
Randy Bush