Bill,

Thanks very much for your reply. You're right--I obviously don't fully understand how 
DNS works. I'll do some more work based on your comments. Regarding a few items you 
brought up...

>Can you define what you mean by that? If you mean build a proper >recursive resolver 
>into SIMS, that would be a bit much to handle the >pathological case of having 
>nothing but MacDNS as a local nameserver.

What I was thinking of was including the option to have SIMS handle RBL lookups by 
directly determining the authoritative NS for the RBL domain and submitting its lookup 
to that NS.

I do agree that it's not worth doing anything to fix a problem caused solely by MacDNS.

>>It
>>seems that this should be too hard. For example, with WhatRoute,
>>when you do a name lookup, it seems to bypass the DNS servers listed
>>in TCP/IP and query the authoritative DNS server directly.
>
>No, it does not. Look at the options in WhatRoute: you can either >have it use the OT 
>DNS config or you can specify alternate settings. >I don't believe it will do its own 
>recursion though, since a correct >recursive resolver is significantly more complex 
>to code than a >simple non-recursive one and there's little point to re-implementing 
>>such a thing when you have one in the OS.

I came to my belief about WhatRoute through the fact that it was able to get replies 
to RBL+ queries when I ran it on the mail server, even when SIMS couldn't. Again, at 
that time, TCP/IP on the server had its DNS set to use the ISP's DNS servers.

>Incidentally, I suspect that your problem may well be MacDNS choking. >The MAPS zones 
>return an extra TXT record, and I seem to recall that >going nuts when given one of 
>those is one of MacDNS' known flaws.

I don't think so. I briefly tried setting MacDNS to use the MAPS NS as one of its 
parents and then putting the MacDNS server's IP as the first DNS server in TCP/IP. I 
*did not* have the MAPS NS listed among the DNS servers in TCP/IP. With this config, 
SIMS was able to use RBL+. But I realized that it would cause all my local users' DNS 
requests to be forwarded to the MAPS NS. Clearly not a thing to do.

To summarize, with SIMS, MacDNS, and WhatRoute running on same machine:

TCP/IP set to use ISP's DNS, MacDNS set to use ISP as parents: SIMS can't query RBL+, 
WhatRoute can.

TCP/IP set to use MAPS DNS, MacDNS set to use ISP as parents: SIMS works, didn't try 
WhatRoute.

TCP/IP set to use local MacDNS, MacDNS set to use MAPS as parent: SIMS works, didn't 
try WhatRoute.

--Elliot Wilen


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