Re: [Doh] A question on the mix of DNS and HTTP semantics

[Daniel Stenberg <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, 18 Mar 2018, Ted Hardie wrote:

> Saying something in the document like "only 2xx response codes will carry 
> response bodies with DNS UDP wireformat" would be a short and sweet way of 
> saying that in the document, if there is working group consensus that this 
> is true.  Based on my conversations yesterday, I am not sure that there is 
> complete consensus on this point, though there may very well be rough 
> consensus.

I'm firmly in the only-2xx-carry-response-bodies-to-care-about camp. I don't 
even understand how it would work otherwise.

What other HTTP response codes could be used to transmit DNS responses?

> A pure transport failure may result in a retry.  There are some of these 
> responses which strongly indicate that such a retry will result in failures 
> (e.g. 403).  If you do not synthesize some message to the DNS client about 
> the type of failure, and the server does not provide one, what part of the 
> system avoids the retry?

For all 4xx HTTP response codes, the "fault" is in the client side (the 
request) so if you as a client decide to retry the request it doesn't at least 
make any sense to send an identical request again.

I don't think 4xx strictly avoids retries. It informs the client about the 
fact that the request, as-is, was denied. A retry would then have to change 
something in the request for it to be successful. 401 and 407 are good 
examples of this, for which clients often retry with a modified request (with 
added auth headers).

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se