Meng Weng Wong <mengwong(_at_)dumbo(_dot_)pobox(_dot_)com>:
But I concede the point. It bothers me also; we are not using DNS as it
was designed.
And it's going to hurt if we do that. I looked at a GUI
DNS-zone-editor project I have on the back burner last night, tried to
do a scratch implementation of SPF records as is. You really can't
comprehend how bad an idea the bizarre subdomains are until you try
modifying something like a zonefile editor to support them.
What we really need is our own RR type, and I would love to have one,
but getting a new RRtype published runs counter to our goal of fast
widespread adoption. I would like to get some input from a DNS WG about
how long it will take to get a new RRtype approved, and whether domains
will need to upgrade their nameservers to work with the new RRtype. I
know tinydns lets you specify any RRtype you want using a ":" line.
I just downloaded the source code of Bind 9. Here is the result of
a caseblind grep for "txt"
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -e grep -n -i -e '"txt"'
./contrib/nslint-2.1a3/nslint.c:1532: /* Handle "txt" record
*/
./contrib/queryperf/queryperf.c:77: "MR", "NULL", "WKS", "PTR", "HINFO",
"MINFO", "MX", "TXT", \
./contrib/sdb/dir/dirdb.c:85: CHECK(dns_sdb_putrr(lookup, "txt",
3600, "dir"));
./contrib/sdb/dir/dirdb.c:92: CHECK(dns_sdb_putrr(lookup, "txt",
3600, buf));
./contrib/sdb/dir/dirdb.c:94: CHECK(dns_sdb_putrr(lookup, "txt",
3600, "pipe"));
./contrib/sdb/dir/dirdb.c:96: CHECK(dns_sdb_putrr(lookup, "txt",
3600, "socket"));
./contrib/sdb/dir/dirdb.c:102: CHECK(dns_sdb_putrr(lookup, "txt",
3600, buf));
./contrib/sdb/dir/dirdb.c:104: CHECK(dns_sdb_putrr(lookup, "txt",
3600, "unknown"));
./contrib/sdb/dir/dirdb.c:108: CHECK(dns_sdb_putrr(lookup, "txt",
3600, buf));
./contrib/sdb/time/timedb.c:72: result = dns_sdb_putrr(lookup, "txt",
1, buf);
./lib/bind/resolv/res_debug.c:431: {ns_t_txt, "TXT", "text"},
All but three hits are in contrib. sdb is really odd, by the way --
it purports to be a hack for turning Unix filesystem information into
a zone database.
The third hit is in a tool for linting zonefiles. The first and last
hits are in debugging code which is apparently not used in resolving a
normal query. Check for yourself.
I conclude that the actual BIND9 query logic is designed sanely,
e.g. neither the code for reading zonefiles into core nor the query
resolver actually cares whether an RR type is "legal" or not, it just
matches the type tag on an incoming request to the type tags in the
digested version of a zonefile.
All this trouble with RRtypes strikes me as the static-IP -> DHCP ->
Rendezvous pattern all over again, but we're still at the static-IP
stage.
Agreed.
How about we use TXT for now and publish a new RRtype in the future?
Pollution of the DNS is a Very Bad Thing, but so is spam, and we have to
make tradeoffs.
You know better than that. If we publish this kluge, it won't get fixed.
Instead people will learn to live with the damage it causes, a bad
precedent will have been set, and eventually it will be one of the bits
of design-rot that contributes to the collapse of DNS.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
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