Thus spake "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com>
On 20-sep-2007, at 21:19, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Sometimes ignoring a problem really does make it go away.
Install a workaround, on the other hand, and the brokenness
remains non-obvious so it persists.
If often persists whether it remains non-obvious or not. I can't count
how many hotels I've visited where I have to disable v6
on my laptop for v4 DNS to work
Yes, hotels are the worst. In Chicago two months ago they used
a NAT timeout in my hotel that was so short that my SSH, IMAP
and IM sessions timed out every few minutes.
Same problem with most WiFi hotspots; I think they use the same all-in-one
boxes for HTTP-interception, DNS, DHCP, etc. There are few vendors in that
space whose boxes _aren't_ broken in myriad different ways. Operators don't
care because they've already gotten your money by the time you discover the
brokenness.
because their boxes break horribly when confronted with an
AAAA lookup. This has been going on for _years_ and the
operators and vendors obviously don't care even though the
problem is blatantly obvious.
Obviously this should be fixed. But: you may ask yourself: why
is your system doing AAAA lookups when you obviously don't
have IPv6 connectivity?
Anyone from Microsoft listening?
I suppose, in theory, a DNS query over v4 might return an AAAA record that
_is_ accessible via one of my link-local addresses or the loopback address.
As long as v6 is _enabled_ on a Windows box, it does AAAA queries, even if
it has to send them via v4. I'm told WinXP isn't even capable of doing DNS
over v6.
I'm not advocating going around and breaking implementations
that don't fully conform with specs on purpose, but if doing the
right thing means that out-of-spec implementations see some
problems, I can usually live with that.
Whether I can live with that in a particular case depends on what
percentage of the userbase will see "some problems" if that brokenness
is exposed.
Ah yes, the "if enough people do something wrong it becomes
right" doctrine. So here in Holland we have "alcohol free" beer
that contains 0.5% alcohol, and megabytes are now 1000000
bytes.
That complaint doesn't resonate so well when you're writing in a language
whose "rules" are defined by whatever people do and if enough people do
something "wrong" it gets reclassified as "right".
There's a difference between de jure and de facto standards. That's not to
say that de jure standards are not needed -- they obviously are -- but when
the majority of people are ignoring them, you can't just stick your head in
the sand and ignore the de facto reality. That _should_ be a sign that the
de jure standards need rewriting after one reviews _why_ the de facto
standard has diverged.
S
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
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