Re: interop problems with getaddrinfo() address selection

[Tony Finch <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, 9 Dec 2007, Keith Moore wrote:
>
> I think it's a stretch to assume that in the future that all IP
> addresses associated with a domain and advertised in DNS are equally
> reachable.

The examples you listed, based on different kinds of connectivity, are
reasonable; what it not is de-randomizing equivalent classes of address.

> What causes the problem is the assumption that a destination can have
> multiple addresses, a source can have multiple addresses, and the party
> initiating the connection can somehow make a good decision about which
> address pair to use without any information from the network.

Yes :-)

> As for DNS randomization, it's never been reasonable to expect an
> application to try each of several addresses in the order returned by
> DNS.

That has been the de facto standard behaviour for over 10 years (though
before getaddrinfo they only tried the first). A lot of sites are going to
be rather upset if wide deployment of RFC 3484 suddenly breaks their
service architecture.

Tony.
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