Re: Should a nameserver know about itself?

[Mats Dufberg]

On Thu, 10 May 2001, Jim Reid wrote:

>     Mark>     Send it a non-recursive query.  A nameserver should
>     Mark> always answer even if it is just a header containing
>     Mark> refused, servfail or notimp.
>
> Yes, but there is one notorious DNS implementation that doesn't do
> that. It fails to return any answer -- not even a referral for . -- if
> it's asked for a name that it isn't authoritative for.

Then it isn't responding, in its true sense. Our control mechanisms of DNS
delegations should not try to handle all buggy servers. In that case the
error message will be "timeout" instead of "non-authoritative answer".


Mats


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Mats Dufberg                                     +46-8-545 857 06
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