Date: Mon, 7 Dec 1998 02:04:19 -0600 (CST) From: Tony Kimball <alk@pobox.com> To: Kurt@pinboard.com Cc: net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: resolver behaviour Message-ID: <13931.34728.540828.941706@avalon.east> References: <13929.39477.406338.806610@avalon.east> <199812052221.RAA10079@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <13930.17883.922553.625725@avalon.east> <3.0.5.16.19981206214053.683794b8@pop.pbdhome.pinboard.com>
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Quoth Kurt Keller on Sun, 6 December: : : If someone tries to look up a hostname which simply does not exist (not : every domain has hosts named ftp, mail, ns, pop, smtp...), what do you : expect the resolver to do? Simply try till the end of time? No, I'd like the resolver to try all of the nameservers which it is configured to try, not to do so unnecessarily, but to do so in a timely manner so that incremental delay is inconsequential. The information exists, out there in the DNS graph. The trick is to squeeze it out. I can't count the times that I have had to resort to manual lookups against alternate nameservers in order to make a connection -- and this has been going on for at least 15 years by my experience. : If you have such a problem, then it's your DNS environment which is at : fault, not the resolver. While this is certainly true, fixing other problems in the resolver by adding configurable new functionality would make it possible to fix this in the resolver configuration. The named setup to fix this doesn't even *exist* in the current BIND 8 distribution, just in 3d pty patches! : If nameservers give bad responses find out where those bad responses : are coming from and send a friendly explanatory e-mail to the admin. At : least up to now it has always worked for me. Most users will not know *how* to do this. Those that do, don't have the time for it. Perhaps named should send mail to postmaster when cache corruption is detected 1/2:-) In general, the administrator can't babysit every websurfing lab user to catch the rare lookup failure. : >Again, the DNS environment on the Internet as a whole is very poor. : : Forward lookups usually work, but I agree that many sites are missing : the propper setup for reverse lookup. "Usually" is a telling characterization. My experience indicates that "usually" could approach much closer to "always" with a little tweaking. I'm very disappointed with this mailing list. There is a real problem which is not technically difficult to solve. I'm hoping that by raising the issue on this list, I can elicit some constructive dialog. While the critical commentary has been useful, more *constructive* suggestions would be much more encouraging. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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