Re: [DNSOP] followup and proposed actions: RFC 6761 interim and next steps

[Paul Wouters <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 26 May 2015, Paul Vixie wrote:

>> Saying there is a concern with dotless MAIL is an easy sell, my question was on issues with not-dotless MAIL.
>
> i agree with ruben. i know of a lot of local uses of HOME, CORP, and
> LOCAL, where non-dotless names inside some network perimeter have local
> meaning. i know of no instance of MAIL being used that way.

How do 15 year old OSes and applications implement and interact for "search domains".

The answer is "very differently and often very wrongly".

Are we sure that an application querying "mail" will still end up receiving
an A record for mail.corp.com. when mail. is delegated. Or will it get
NXDOMAIN and fail the mail. And when the application sending mail is not
an enduser MUA, what will happen with these failed emails and when will
people notice the problem?

I've been inside a bank network where they could not get rid of "unused"
zones for > 10 years because of unqualified lookups and applications of
which they only had the binary and no replacement product ready, running
on very old Microsoft Windows versions. (although perhaps now they could
DNAME it)

While this applies to all unqualified names, the most used ones that I
expect this would hit, based on my personal biased experience, is
"linux", "server", "mail", "oracle" and "exchange".

The last two can be handled by those starting the problem TLDs (vendor and
their customers). The first three will cause outages and problems.

Paul