[DNSOP] Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Call for Adoption: draft-davies-internal-tld

[Philip Homburg <[e-mail]>]

>As you're no doubt aware, there are 7 TLDs currently listed in
>https://www.iana.org/assignments/special-use-domain-names/special-use-domain-names.xhtml.
>Each of those can imply (but do not necessarily require) special
>handling, either in authoritative code, resolver code, or the
>surrounding client or server infrastructure. Given those seven, it
>seems silly to me to not add another TLD that may imply special
>handling by DNS developers or operators.

As far as I can tell those 7 (alt., example., invalid., local., localhost.,
onion. and test.) are not meant to be used in regular, production DNS.

local. is used for mDNS, alt. and onion. are specifically not DNS. And
example, invalid, localhost and test are all special in various ways.

Internal. is quite different. It is meant to be used for regular
DNS, just not on the Internet.

There is a bit of confusing language in RFC 6761:

4.  Caching DNS Servers:

    Are developers of caching domain name servers expected to make
    their implementations recognize these names as special and treat
    them differently?  If so, how?

What is important for internal is whether the server is a recursive
resolver or not. There are plenty of caching DNS servers that only
forward requests.

It seems to me that requiring action from caching forwarders is counter
productive. To make matters more complex, some software can be
recursive resolver or forwarded depending on the configuration.