CNAME and other data -vs- could not find NS and/or SOA records

[phil-news-nospam at ipal.net]

On Wed, 02 Jun 2004 17:13:19 -0400 Kevin Darcy <kcd at daimlerchrysler.com> wrote:

| That's ridiculous. You want to special-case SOA and NS records? You want 
| to selectively disable aliasing for SOA and NS? But what if I *want* to 
| alias an SOA or NS record? What if I'm doing that today? You've just 

If you have figured out how to do that today, then why not just say how
you are doing it and we can end this thread as "problem solved".  If I'm
to believe others here, you can't be doing that, anyway.


| taken away functionality that people might be relying on. You'll never 
| get that deployed unless you extend the protocol with some sort of 
| "versioning" functionality so a client and server can agree to use the 
| "Phil Howard" semantics instead of the normal ones. Good luck on that.
| 
| If I have the time, I might
| generalize my patch so that it allows CNAME with any record, and answers
| the CNAME if specific requested records are not present, or for ANY.
| I think that will maximize the workability.
| 
| OK, but the stranded CNAME problems rears its ugly head again. You can't 
| guarantee whether a given cache has the "specific requested records 
| [...] present" or not, since any RRset can expire from the cache at any 
| given time. I suppose you could limit your new semantics to only 
| *authoritative* servers, but now you've created an inconsistency 
| problem, where caching resolvers give different answers from 
| authoritative servers for the same query. Bad juju...

Since my case doesn't require the generalization, then we can drop that idea.
That leaves the CNAME record as the only record in the zone, and we're aliasing
even the SOA and NS records as you suggested above that you might want to use.
So, if the authoritative server, for any query, always answers with a CNAME
pointing to the target domain to query, what breaks?

-- 
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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