Re: [DNSOP] QNAME minimisation on the standards track?

On Tue, 17 Jul 2018, manu tman wrote:

> I'd like to see this standardized too.
> Side note: I would also be interested to get a return of experience from people operating qname minimization at scale,

I suspect you're looking for feedback from recursive operators, but I'd 
like to share our experience as an authoritative operator.  Supporting 
QNAME minimization as an authoritative implies correctly responding 
NOERROR to empty-non-terminals (ENTs) within the zone.  RFC 4592 clarifies 
the interaction between wildcards and ENTs, however this poses a problem 
with customer-provided zone data.

RFC 4592's behavior is not intuitive to most of our customers, and given 
that many other authoritative operators did not (and perhaps still don't) 
correctly handle interaction between wildcards and ENTs, we received 
significant customer pushback when we started correctly handling ENTs and 
wildcards.  In short, as far as customers are concerned, '*' should always 
match "across" dots.  _We_ all understand why it doesn't, but it's not 
intuitive to our customers, and it is no longer the case that the person 
managing a company's zone has an extensive background in DNS.  (Nor, 
frankly, should it be the case).

Here's a common example:  Consider a SaaS/cloud provider that onboards 
customers through CNAMEs.   For example, cloudco.biz would onboard 
example.com by creating "example.com.cloudco.biz" and CNAMEing it to some 
internal name.   The SaaS provider also typically has a wildcard at/below 
the apex of their zone (*.cloudco.biz) to gracefully handle their 
customers who may put the CNAME in place before they have been 
fully provisioned.

Such a zone, by definition, potentially has ENTs at every possible TLD. 
Thus, www.notyetprovisioned.com.clouco.biz will never match the wildcard 
at the apex, because of the ENT at com.cloudco.biz.  The SaaS provider is 
now causing a significant outage for their in-the-process-of-onboarding 
customers, and the provider is rightly very unenthusiastic about copying 
that apex wildcard down to every TLD.  The problem is further compounded 
with ccTLDs (www.example.co.uk.cloudco.biz creates two ENTs: one at uk, 
one at co.uk).  This rapidly becomes an untenable solution for our 
customers, and they're likely to seek out another authoritative provider.

I realize this is a somewhat a special case, but there were (still are?) 
many large authoritative DNS providers in this position, and our effort to 
support QNAME minimization pushed a large operational problem onto our 
customers.

-Jon

--
Jonathan Reed
Senior Performance Engineer
Akamai Technologies

> the type of issues encountered, what are the ratios of such errors.... hint @marek :)
> 
> Manu
> 
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 2:35 PM Paul Wouters <paul@nohats.ca> wrote:
>       On Tue, 17 Jul 2018, tjw ietf wrote:
>
>       > Subject: Re: [DNSOP] QNAME minimisation on the standards track?
>       >
>       > I’d like to see a more fleshed out operational considerations section.
>
>       That would be good indeed. Especially with respect to broken DNS load
>       balancers.
>
>       I have enabled it in Fedora from the start and did run into a few problem
>       domains, and some people turning it off. But that happened less than I
>       had expected. Red Hat did not yet enable this in RHEL7 but it is planned
>       to be enabled in RHEL8.
>
>       But I do believe qname minimisation is an important privacy enhancing
>       technology that we should strongly promote as a standards track
>       document.
>
>       Paul
>
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>