What will break: "Non-authoritative answer"
Kevin Darcy
kcd at daimlerchrysler.com
Thu Jun 7 03:29:18 UTC 2001
Normal application-embedded resolvers shouldn't care about authoritative
versus non-authoritative, since they generally don't even know whether
they're talking to a caching server or not. The only thing that I could
imagine caring would be other nameservers. I believe BIND marks lame
servers and doesn't use them for a while (hoping that they'll get
better). If so, then conceivably if all of the servers for a particular
zone are lame, then BIND nameservers might become temporarily unable to
resolve *any* names in the zone. This would then affect
*all* applications trying to resolve those names. Other nameserver
implementations might treat lame servers similarly, with similar
results.
The most noticeable impact, however, is that if a master goes
non-authoritative, zone transfers break and therefore changes to the
zone won't propagate, thus creating data inconsistencies.
- Kevin
Farid Hamjavar wrote:
> You all ,I am sure, have come across the situation
> where due some reasons, syntax error in named.conf or
> some other configuration errors large or small, got
> the "Non-authoritative answer" from your DNS server of
> the domain you admin. i.e. you looked up something
> and got the correct answer alright, but you also
> see the "Non-authoritative answer" message. You got
> "Non-authoritative answer" on a lookup of something for
> which your DNS server is supposed to be authoritative!
>
> Considering the explanation above, here is my question.
> When in an environment that provides net services like
> mail,web,ftp,etc,etc what services suffer and become
> dysfunctional if name-server behave the way explained above?
>
> Has anyone compiled a list? e.g. Will MTA of various flavors
> (sendmail,qmail,etc) become paralyzed if name-server they
> point to behave the way explained above?
>
> Thanks,
> Farid
> UNM
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