On Mar 31, 2013, at 10:22 , Jim Reid <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 31 Mar 2013, at 14:36, "Patrick W. Gilmore" <[email protected]> wrote:

>> CloudFlare, CacheFly, and a few other CDNs who anycast web server addresses 
>> would probably disagree.
> 
> Yeah. We both know we have had those discussions before Patrick and 
> (hopefully) agreed to disgagree. :-)

You are welcome to disagree, but you are not disagreeing with me. Neither I nor 
my company use anycasted TCP services. (We do anycast name servers, which I 
guess could be considered TCP since there is fallback.)

Lots of other companies do, and they claim it works. Perhaps you should ask 
them if they - and their clients - are confused and this really doesn't work? 
Because empirical evidence trumps arguments on a mailing list.


>>> Keeping state for bazillions of DNS TCP connections to a resolving server 
>>> will present further challenges. [Maybe TCPCT could help.] That could lead 
>>> to a new DoS attack vector: overwhelming a resolving server with too much 
>>> TCP traffic. Though that could be done already I suppose.
>> 
>> Shouldn't be difficult to keep TCP in a different thread or process, so UDP 
>> is unaffected.
> 
> Isolating TCP and UDP traffic at the DNS server is not the issue I think. 
> Keeping bazillions of protocol control blocks (or equivalent) in the kernel, 
> one for each TCP connection, is. Though I'd welcome getting told I am wrong 
> about that. Those PCBs have to stick around for twice the maximum segment 
> life time, typically a minute or more. DNS over TCP could easily mean 
> resolvers handling orders of magnitude more connections (ie PCBs) than the 
> busiest of web servers. A DNS server getting ~10Kqps over TCP would have 
> around 1 million "active" PCBs in the kernel: nasty.

Someone else pointed out web servers do this.

OTOH: Web servers tend to be a bit beefier than name servers. So this is really 
just a CapEx discussion.

But like I said, I do not think it is a good idea anyway.


>>> Another problem is lots of crapware -- CPE, hotel networks, coffee shop 
>>> wi-fi, etc -- assume DNS is only ever done over UDP. Anyone stuck behind 
>>> that already loses whenever they get a truncated response. They'll have 
>>> much bigger problems if resolving servers default to truncation and TCP 
>>> retries for everything. I suppose more use of DNS over TCP could provide an 
>>> incentive to get those broken middleboxes fixed. Wouldn't hold my breath 
>>> though....
>> 
>> Maybe it would be an incentive to fix those broken clients?
> 
> It's not the users' clients that are broken. [Though they may be bust too.] 
> It's the middleware crap that these clients sit behind: the DSL or cable box 
> that the typical Internet user has or the hotel/coffee-shop network that 
> mangles DNS packets. I already said forcing DNS over TCP could provide an 
> incentive to get those middleware devices fixed but doubted this would ever 
> happen. Good luck getting a Wal-mart or Verizon (say) to beat up their 
> Chinese suppliers for shipping DSL boxes that constrain DNS to UDP packets of 
> less than 512 bytes.

The OP suggested forcing TCP for off-net users only.

If those clients are on-net, they won't need TCP, and the crapware doesn't 
matter.

If they are off-net, they are broken clients, and need to be fixed.

Either way, the crapware is not an issue. (To this idea. We both agree the 
crapware is, well, crap. :)

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

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