Dnstap Re: Deprecation notice for BIND 9.20+: Unix Domain Sockets for control channel (rndc)

[Fred Morris]

No objections, however I hope somebody lets me know if the same thing is 
contemplated for Dnstap and what the timeline is. I won't be unduly 
lathered by such an occurrence but I'd rather not have fire drills (and 
it's not just me it's people / projects downstream of me).

FTR, I've always used an IP address with RNDC.

On Tue, 12 Sep 2023, Ondřej Surý wrote:
>
> [...] The support for Unix
> Domain Sockets is already non-operational since BIND 9.18.0 and it is a fatal
> error in named. This is properly documented in BIND 9.18.0 release notes and
> known issues.
>
> We are now proceeding to complete remove the rest of the code and documentation
> from BIND 9.20+ (future release).
>
> [...]
>
> 1. Using 'unix' option in 'controls {}' block in named.conf is already a fatal error in named
>
> The original issue is tracked under: https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/-/issues/1759

This wasn't particularly reassuring considering the Dnstap case. It 
discusses something called "netmgr" which is used for "incoming DNS 
queries and responses" and that now is apparently being adapted to a 
control channel; it talks about modifying it to support outbound TCP 
connections.

Dnstap has never been a server, it establishes an outbound connection to a 
listener (server) on a unix socket. Seems like TCP has always been an 
option for rndc, while it's never been an option for Dnstap; so that's a 
difference, there's no explicit migration path at this moment.

Personally I'd be happy to see the last of framestreams (we don't need the 
handshake, I've never used it and I've only ever seen it create confusion 
for people trying to roll their own servers). I'd love to see UDP so that 
we could get multicast (without a T/MG), but that doesn't allow for the 
Dnstap overhead since DNS message sizes are already capped at the maximum 
possible size of a UDP message.

Doing nothing is an option. ;-)


Thanks for all the work you do...

--

Fred Morris