What will break: "Non-authoritative answer"

[Farid Hamjavar]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2001 Mark.Andrews at nominum.com wrote:

> Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2001 13:51:57 +1000
> From: Mark.Andrews at nominum.com
> To: Farid Hamjavar <hamjavar at unm.edu>
> Cc: bind-users at isc.org
> Subject: Re: What will break: "Non-authoritative answer"
>
>
> 	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.


No. Just continuous learning about DNS. Thanks to all who responded.
Farid
UNM



>
> 	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
>