clueing in TLD registries for delegations to non-BIND servers

At 9:38 PM +0100 2003/02/09, Stefan Paletta wrote:

>  [please do not explicitly send copies of followups to me]

	Roger.

>  The ability to hand out referrals has an administrative overhead and
>  is thus more prone to errors. The recent misconfiguration of NS.EU.NET
>  is a good example for that.

	It does require more network traffic, yes.  But the specific IP 
addresses should not be paid attention to by anyone -- all they 
should record is that they got a response that basically said "Sorry, 
I don't have this information -- if you like, you may try asking this 
question of these machines".

>  Most importantly, responding with a SERVFAIL is RFC compliant.

	I am not yet convinced of this.  Yes, I've read the namedroppers 
traffic.  But so far as I know, this issue has never been put into a 
ID, BCP, or standards-track RFC.  Therefore, a very small community 
of people have discussed this issue in very isolated circumstances, 
and IMO this has not received sufficient review to be considered "RFC 
compliant".

>  Are you suggesting that different demands for conformance should be
>  applied to root/TLD nameservers vs. others?

	Depends on what you're testing against.

>  There is btw. nothing in the announcements of and documentation for
>  NSD to suggest that it might not be designed or fit for use as a
>  general-purpose authoritative nameserver.

	Understood.  However, obviously people are now mis-using it in 
this fashion (perhaps even at my behest, as a result of my 
presentation at LISA 2002), otherwise the original report would never 
have been generated.

	Therefore, I believe that making this point explicit is a very good idea.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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