Hi Don,
On 2013-09-18, at 16:19, Don Stokes
On 19/09/13 02:14, Joe Abley wrote:
But Google DNS is not "standard" DNS. In what way?
The short answer is, "I don't know." In Google's words, "Google Public DNS takes some new approaches that we believe offer more valid results, increased security, and, in most cases, better performance." I don't know what those "new approaches" are. Do you?
I don't, but I don't necessarily read into that text that their approach is non-standard. It's clearly standard enough to interop well with a large variety of client implementations that run entirely different code.
"Not 'standard'" was perhaps a little unfair, but it is fair to say that Google DNS is not implemented the way one would expect a "normal", stand-alone BIND or similar name server to be,
Depends what you mean by similar, I guess. YADIFA, knot, NSD, PowerDNS, Microsoft DNS, etc, etc all follow usefully different approaches, and are implemented to varying degrees differently from BIND9. I don't think that means any of them are necessarily non-standard for that reason, though. (They might well be non-standard in other ways, of course.) An enduring complaint about the DNS in general is that the specifications are smeared liberally over a boatload of different RFCs, seasoned with implementation decisions made by early implementors which are not written down. A consequence of this mess is that it's very difficult to design a compliance test suite with any teeth. (A related problem is that nobody seems to have much interest in designing a compliance test suite anyway.) I've definitely found non-standard behaviour with particular implementations from time to time, and I thought perhaps you had seen something interesting with 8.8.8.8. But I understand what you were getting at. Joe