Persistent cache

Pete Ehlke pde at ehlke.net
Mon Nov 11 19:09:39 UTC 2002


On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 01:06:40PM -0500, Kevin Darcy wrote:
> 
> ObiWan wrote:
> 
> > Till now afaik we solved a *whole lot* of problems, many ISP DNS servers
> > used by "standard" home users have a lot of configuration problems (w/o
> > to talk about speed) what's more a whole lot of such DNS won't work as
> > needed and gives many "negative answers" for perfectly legal and existing
> > hosts, BIND-PE solves such issues and more,
> 
> So, how does this "persisted cache" mystically, psychically know that it is
> right, and that the ISP's nameservers are broken/wrong? Maybe the ISP's have
> made a more recent query than your nameserver, and received a negative
> response. How can your nameserver know that this is *not* the case (unless it
> has an independent means of getting the same data, in which case why bother
> using your ISP's nameservers at all?)
> 
> Also, if the problem is that the ISP's nameservers are broken, why not just
> get them to fix/upgrade their nameservers? Seems like that would help
> *everyone* who is using those nameservers, rather than just selfishly kludging
> things for yourselves...
> 
Well, this paragraph from the bind-pe site seems telling:

         All standard as well as new TLD's (.aero etc.) are included and
         accessible for DNS name resolutions and browsing. Alternate
         TLD's like http://chrono.faq/ and http://free.tibet (almost 200
         additional TLD's) websites which were not normally available in
         Legacy (default ISP DNS) setups and configurations will now be
         viewable in your browsers once the BIND-PE program is installed
         and enabled.

So the 'perfectly legal and existing hosts' would seem to be mostly
hosts that only exist in made-up, unofficial TLDs that don't exist in
'.'. The agenda here looks to be more about subverting '.' than about
actual performance. If I were writing a name server for home use that
came configured out of the box to support every flaky, hare-braned
'alternative TLD' on the planet, I'd be tempted to save the cache
between invocations too. Some of those things have some mighty dodgy
servers themselves. But the whole enterprise, from soup to nuts, is
ill-advised and, in precise and technical language, just plain icky.

-Pete



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