What will break: "Non-authoritative answer"

[Mark.Andrews at nominum.com]

	First of all, learn about human factors.  Justified text
	like that below is HARD to read.  If you want people to
	answer queries don't make it hard for them.

	I'm sure a lot of people on this list read half of the
	first paragraph and gave up.

	It doesn't matter about the applications.  Nameservers skip
	broken servers/zone and 99.999% of non local end user
	queries will be through nameservers that drop such answers.
	Locally it's not the non-authoratitive of answer that is
	the problem, applications expect to get answers from the
	cache.  What is a problem is that servers return SERVFAIL
	rather that NODATA/NXDOMAIN and this breaks things.

	Why are you worrying about this?  Just fix the broken
	zone/server and be done with it.

	Mark

> 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
> 
> 
> 
--
Mark Andrews, Nominum Inc.
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: Mark.Andrews at nominum.com