I was watching the DNS query stream hitting a few rbldnsd servers recently and noticed a small % of systems sending queries padded with hundreds of nulls at the end of the packet. 540 is a common total packet size (512 byte query + 28 bytes IP/UDP header). 551/523 is another common size to pad to. Of the resolvers doing this that I've been able to identify, it seems to be a "MS Windows thing". Some of them will pad some queries to 512, some to 523, and then not pad at all for some queries.

Typical query size on these servers is about 80-90 bytes, so the padded queries are >400 bytes of nulls. I don't think I've seen a padded query padded to less than 512 bytes.

Googling, I haven't been able to find anything about why queries might be null padded. I wonder if anyone has noticed this previously and if anyone knows why this is done?...especially the resolvers that pad inconsistently.

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 Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
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