With a mandated default minimum maximum of 512 octets, the DNS
protocol presents some special problems for zones wishing to
advertise moderate or high numbers of authority servers (NS RRs).
This document explains the operational issues caused by or related to
this response size limit.
Hmm. Back in '97 (I think), there was a draft that was created on pretty much the same topic. This was right after the 19-hour downtime at AOL, and where much of the Internet was unable to send e-mail because we were advertising too many MXes (45?), and combined with the two minute TCP timeout and typical queue runner startup times (every sixty minutes), many sites would stack up queue runners until they ran out of memory (real & virtual) and the server would crash. These queue runners would get a timeout on each of the advertised MXes, and not be able to process any other mail while sitting and spinning their wheels.
However, that draft ultimately died. Both qmail and postfix should avoid excessive problems of this sort, and intelligent installations of sendmail should avoid problems of this sort, but I'm sure that there are plenty of sites out there that are still vulnerable to this sort of thing.
Would it be possible to incorporate some analysis and recommendations on this issue in future versions of this draft?
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