Users Want *Seamless* Solutions, Not Patchwork (was Re: Users want solutions, not buzzwords)

[D. J. Bernstein]

Kevin Darcy writes:
> use that same set of servers for foo.example.com and all subzones
> thereof, *even*though*the*delegations*point*elsewhere*,

It makes no sense to ignore the delegations. Those servers _do not have
the information_. You have to contact the proper servers. This is what
djbdns does automatically. BIND has no comparable mechanism.

A _cache_ will contact the proper servers on your behalf, if you have
authorization to use that cache. The point of BIND's forwarding, and
djbdns's FORWARDONLY, is to funnel requests through an external cache.
But a _server_ has no reason to accept recursive queries.

See RFC 1035, page 6, if you don't understand the difference between
caches (``resolvers'' in the old terminology) and servers.

> I can't imagine anyone who cares about the ease of
> installing/maintaining/cloning their DNS setup running with *both*
> packages simultaneously, except possibly as a temporary migration
> step. If they do, they're insane.

It's common for people to install djbdns and switch their caching to
dnscache, following strategy 2 in http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/frombind.html,
before they've even started to consider whether to switch their DNS
service to tinydns. This is a very easy way to deal with a BIND cache
running out of memory, for example.

> My point is, though, whether it's 3Kb or 3Mb, waste is waste.

Get a grip. Resource consumption is a matter of economics, not religion.
Spending 3MB is 1024 times more important than spending 3KB.

---Dan