... it's that, or my reading of RFC 2181 has gone horribly wrong.
The problem is this: the authoritative servers for a domain can easily
never be consulted for DNS data if the resource being looked up
happens to be available at the parent zone. That is,
bigbox.example.net's address and the RR's TTL can never be as
specified by the zone master unless he or she has control over the
parent zone's delegation to example.net if bigbox.example.net happens
to be serving for example.net. (Registries give you address control,
of course, but often they fix on large TTLs.)
As far as I can tell, every public recursive server I can reach,
dnscache and BIND9, and one Microsoft cache and one of whatever
OpenDNS uses, all do the wrong thing (TM) and never look up true data
from authoritative name servers. They hang on to additional section
data from the delegating name server and pass this on as truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth to everybody who asks. This
means that if my machine happens to be serving for my domain, I'll
never be able to reduce the TTL to a reasonable value for my dynamic
conditions. Even if, in all seriousness, going ahead with a dynamic
address is a nuisance, is this use of additional data not
fundamentally broken?
If there is consensus on the wrong behaviour, I'd like it written
somewhere, so I can feel happy about it just being the way it is by
implementation, common sense, performance, or whatever. Then I can
conform to reality by just using a separate name in delegations.
Alternatively, if *I* wrote a DNS cache, I'd simply use non-
authoritative data, and expect it, only when necessary: as soon as
I've chased whatever referals are necessary, I can throw it away. I
can rely on two things that make this reasonable: (I) that it's the
requested RRs I'm interested in and not the delegation, and (II) that
I can get, and will often get, better additional data from
authoritative name servers that I have no reason not to hang on to
and, as needed, to propagate. Besides, it's easier this way to detect
discrepancies between the delegation and the zone master.
Cheers,
Sabahattin
_______________________________________________
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf