Re: [dane] Behavior in the face of no answer?

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 04:42:13AM +0200, Martin Rex wrote:
> Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> > 
> > Note that there remain _plenty_ of DNS servers deployed in the wild
> > which, if you ask them for an RRTYPE they don't know about, spit up
> > with NOTIMP, SERVFAIL, and all manner of other crappy nonsense.
> 
> You seem to be unaware that returning SERVFAIL and more so NOTIMP
> to requests for unknown RRTYPES is *PERFECTLY* conformant with
> rfc1034/rfc1035.  So if anything is _broken_, its clients who can
> not cope with such responses (as can be seen with the IPv6 dualstack
> in Windows2003).

I'm not unaware of this (although I think there is rather less
consensus about the correctness of those RCODE responses than you seem
to be suggesting).  I just think it's crappy.  RFC 3597 was published
in 2003.  There is no excuse any more for a server of any sort to be
incapable of handling unknown RRTYPEs.  I get the arguments about
provisioning systems, and I think they're real problems.  But by now,
if your _server_ doesn't handle unknown RRTYPEs it is plainly garbage,
and ought to be off the Net.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that people who are told to go
develop a DNS server in a weekend read RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 --
usually selectively, it appears to me -- and nothing else.  I wish I
had a good idea about what to do about this.  (That's all I'll say
about it here, though, because it's plainly off-topic.)

Best,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]