On 20-sep-2007, at 21:19, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Sometimes ignoring a problem really does make it go away. Install a workaround, on the other hand, and the brokenness remains non-obvious so it persists.
If often persists whether it remains non-obvious or not. I can't count how many hotels I've visited where I have to disable v6 on my laptop for v4 DNS to work
Yes, hotels are the worst. In Chicago two months ago they used a NAT timeout in my hotel that was so short that my SSH, IMAP and IM sessions timed out every few minutes.
because their boxes break horribly when confronted with an AAAA lookup. This has been going on for _years_ and the operators and vendors obviously don't care even though the problem is blatantly obvious.
Obviously this should be fixed. But: you may ask yourself: why is your system doing AAAA lookups when you obviously don't have IPv6 connectivity?
I'm not advocating going around and breaking implementations that don't fully conform with specs on purpose, but if doing the right thing means that out-of-spec implementations see some problems, I can usually live with that.
Whether I can live with that in a particular case depends on what percentage of the userbase will see "some problems" if that brokenness is exposed.
Ah yes, the "if enough people do something wrong it becomes right" doctrine. So here in Holland we have "alcohol free" beer that contains 0.5% alcohol, and megabytes are now 1000000 bytes.
For instace, we accomodate multi-faced DNS because most "major" web sites would become inaccessible if it weren't.
??? How come? _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf