Re: [DNSOP] BCP on rrset ordering for round-robin? Also head's up on bind 9.12 bug (sorting rrsets by default)

Just a question on this: was the old/classic behavior really
random/shuffled? Or was it that bind would "rotate" through iterations
where the order was the same each time if you think of the rrset list as a
ring, but with a different start and end point within that ring? (That's
what's described here:
https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/networking_2ndEd/dns/ch10_07.htm)

On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 1:17 PM, Erik Nygren <erik+ietf@nygren.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 3:52 PM, Mukund Sivaraman <muks@mukund.org> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 02:38:00PM -0400, Bob Harold wrote:
>> > Round-robin is a documented feature that many applications use.
>> Removing
>> > it from DNS resolvers, and then having to add it to a much larger
>> number of
>> > applications, does not seem like a good trade-off.
>>
>> The _default_ in BIND 9.12 was changed from order random to order
>> none. It seems to be missing from the release notes by mistake, but the
>> administrator manual mentions what the default is
>>
>
> We have many years of software that relies on emergent behaviors from the
> current default.
> While pedantically it may be true that these should be treated as
> unordered sets and that
> applications or stub resolver libraries should do some permutations or
> randomized selection,
> that doesn't match the current reality for widely used software (eg, curl
> and ssh, which I'm
> sure is just the tip of the iceberg).
>
> Software should have safe defaults that matches common expectations.
> Those common expectations, as demonstrated by the configuration of all
> of the large public resolvers I've tested, as well as by how common
> software behaves,
> is that the order of results is NOT consistent.  In many environments,
> this lack
> of consistency is relied upon for systems to work properly..  Switching to
> consistent
> order is no big deal on a small scale, but a widespread shift (eg, as
> would happen
> due to a change in default in popular software) would almost certainly
> have
> significant operational impact and is something that warrants significant
> discussion
> about the practical implications.
>
> This ambiguity in the current specifications results in this mismatch
> between the pedantic (rrsets are explicitly unordered, and a consistent
> order is a subset of that) and the current reality (applications and
> services
> rely on resolvers-at-scale to be explicitly inconsistent in the ordering
> of rrsets)
> is why I started off by proposing that we may need a BCP or informational
> RFC
> that describes the currently assumed defaults and best-practices
> (ie, round-robin is assumed in many places so don't consistently order
> at-scale by default).
>
>         Erik
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Colm