Andrew Sullivan wrote:
Dear colleagues, Joe Abley and I have just submitted a draft (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-sullivan-dnsop-refer-down/) that is intended to capture the discussion here about referrals and how to describe them. It is intended for BCP, and it discourages upward referrals by authoritative servers. That leaves the task of the referrals definition. I have some new text below: ---%<---cut here--- ... The second is an upward referral (sometimes described as "root referral" or just "referral response", as distinct from the delegation response above), where the server is not authoritative for any portion of the QNAME. When this happens, the referred-to zone in the Authority section is usually the root zone (.). In normal DNS operation, this kind of response is not strictly speaking required to work, and in practice some authoritative server operators will not return referral responses beyond those required for delegation. ... ---cut here--->%--- Comments, please. Also, Joe and I solicit comments on the referrals draft proper, but it would be nice to put that in a different thread.
what would "to work" mean in the above text? if you ask some authority server a question, it is either authoritative for some part of it in which case you'll get NOERROR and either an answer or a referral, or it is not authoritative and nothing it can tell you will help in any way other than some kind of "i am not authoritative for any part of the question you have asked me".
that an upward referral could "work" in the above-reference sense seems to imply that the authority server you've queried, knows more about where the zone really is, than you could learn by walking down from the root. that's a walking talking nonsequitur. could you tell me what you really mean by "to work" since it can't possibly be that?
-- P Vixie _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
