note to myself - why DNS ANY queries are a bad thing

Posted by Stefan Schmidt Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:57:00 GMT

Alright i’m abusing my blog as a bookmarking tool again…

Last week a collegue of mine hit a problem in his java code trying to resolve mailexchange handler (MX) hostnames. He tried to get both A and AAAA records at the same time with the java dns library (JNDI) and found that sometimes he would only get a SOA reply back and that the library was doing ANY queries to accomplish the task with just one DNS query.

This is error! ;-)

Bert Hubert pointed me to this thread on the issue whether a recursive nameserver should recursve for any records upon an ANY query or just answer them from its cache if it has something for the qname.

As Edward Lewis put it:

I’ll nominate section 5.3.3. of rfc 1034:

5.3.3. Algorithm

The top level algorithm has four steps:

1. See if the answer is in local information, and if so return
   it to the client.

…

T_ANY is at best a debugging tool. It has been used in the past to get mail records I think, but really, T_ANY is just for debugging and others trying to abuse the service.

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mymuesli

Posted by Stefan Schmidt Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:12:00 GMT

I always wanted to try it out after someone (i think it was fh told me about mymuesli in 2k7.

As it just so happens i received a newsletter from Paypal this morning baiting me with free shipping, so i ordered these: Zaps Berry Crunch, Zaps Classic

Can’t really wait to test em because a) i never ate a cereal like those two combinations and b) i haven’t had breakfast yet. ;-)

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show your (html) body

Posted by Stefan Schmidt Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:38:00 GMT

Thanks to this german news article i am now aware that today it is “CSS Naked Day” where you get your site stripped of all its cloth^h^h^h err CSS stylesheets and see if it is standards compliance and still looks good without all that nifty design f00.

Before you complain: Yes i know that despite the links on the bottom my blog does not validate for xhtml… Typo puts it there and i did not have the guts to go look for it in the code. ;-)

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rain(bow) check

Posted by Stefan Schmidt Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:28:00 GMT

So what do you think.

Is my blog magenta or what?

I think its not too far from this or this and that but there’s always someone straying the other way off course… ;-)

Apparently there are more shades of pink than magenta.

In the other news:

Don’t run a DNS smokeping on the root nameservers if you’re not ready to see this…

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more magenta

Posted by Stefan Schmidt Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:13:00 GMT

I already knew that german telecom was tracking the use of ‘magenta’ in other countries too but i just now stumbled over this interesting/funny site from the Netherlands. http://www.freemagenta.nl/

As some commenter in a webforum said “This marketing desaster will be hard to overcome, even with the billions they are putting in there.”

I know there were some german sites dealing with that topic too but sadly i cannot remember any of those anymore.

Anyways, its still pink for me. ;-)

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magenta

Posted by Stefan Schmidt Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:46:00 GMT

After reading This engadget article i could not hold back anymore and switched by blog theme once again. Originally it was ‘Pink!’ by Jordan Elver but i shamelessly ripped and modified it a bit so that it now features a T-Com style magenta ‘Z’ insignia. ;-)

Go get it here if you like it. Works for me with Typo 5.0.3 at least.

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