Re: DNS complaint
bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens) wrote on 26.03.97 in <[🔎] m0w9oCi-00Idf6C@golem.pixar.com>:
> Can someone point out the problems in our DNS maps?
*Is* it a problem with the DNS maps?
> I am the sysadmin for 'org.org', and in the process on tracking down some
> performance problems here, I've noticed that we get tons of traffic from
> your site(s) looking for yourdomain.org.org instead of yourdomain.org.
Sounds like a site under .org looking for another site under .org, and
using an old version of the resolver. The famous case where this happened
was something like *.com.edu.
I suspect it is actually nothing that we do (and so nothing that we can do
anything about).
> The particular requests we have seen *today* are:
It would surely help to know which machines made those request. I suspect
that those machines are misconfigured.
Background:
In the past, when you were looking for x.y.c on host a.b.c, the resolver
usually tried the following names in sequence:
x.y.z.b.c
x.y.z.c
x.y.z
Modern resolvers, on the other hand, by default do not try anything else
for x.y.z, and for names without any dots - say, q - only try q.b.c. This
is configurable.
Those old resolvers are probably the cause of the problem. We can make
sure we don't use them ourselves, but I don't think we can do anything
else.
IMHO, org.org is doomed to live with this problem. There's just too much
of an installed base.
However, if they want to do something about it, they should talk to the
owners of the misconfigured machines, not to every other *.org domain.
To put it differently, it's our existence that hurts them, not anything we
do.
To put it yet another way, it's just plain stupid to use a second level
domain that's the same as a well-used first level domain. It ought to
work, but it does not.
MfG Kai
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