[84968] in North American Network Operators' Group

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Re: Weird DNS issues for domains

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Todd Vierling)
Thu Sep 29 15:49:10 2005

Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:46:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org>
To: Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
Cc: Matthew Crocker <matthew@crocker.com>,
	"Robert E.Seastrom" <rs@seastrom.com>, nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <17212.12082.163714.143619@roam.psg.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu


On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Randy Bush wrote:

> >> You might want to consider reading RFC 2182 though, particularly the
> >> part about geographically diverse nameservers.
> > Yeah, yeah,  that is overrated.  If my site goes dark and my DNS goes
> > down it doesn't really matter as the bandwidth and the web server
> > will also be down.
>
> and folk who would otherwise spool mail for you will throw it
> on the floor.  enjoy.

As I tried to explain in the other response, if this were the case with said
unnamed MTAs, then a simple tier-1 outage (which is not all that uncommon)
or a site under packet flood attacks would cause immediate bounces due to
DNS timeouts.  The same thing applies to a site whose DNS is simply
unreachable because its link is down.

When a MTA gets a failed lookup response, it should retry.  When the domain
*does* resolve, but resolves to *empty or nonexistent*, then the mail should
bounce.  When a DNS server is unreachable, it can hardly return a NXDOMAIN
back to the requestor.  8-P

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>

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