[as112-ops] hidden secondary for iana.org?

[Joe Abley]

On 20-May-2009, at 08:33, Aleksi Suhonen wrote:

> Joe Abley wrote:
>> That's interesting. Do you have any idea why?
> > are there clients which normally send queries for IANA.ORG to the
> > AS112 servers, just for fun?
>
> Yes, I suspect this is so. I also see a lot of other queries that  
> have nothing to do with in-addr.arpa. on the surface.

It might be interesting to mine this query data and see if any  
patterns emerge. Maybe there's something interesting to learn about  
some embedded DNS client, or some new malware, or something.

>>> Apart from IANA's willingness to share access to such hidden  
>>> secondaries of course.
>
>> ... I'm not sure what benefit slaving IANA.ORG would really have  
>> for anybody, over the normal referral path to the IANA.ORG  
>> authoritative servers.
>
> Well if you want to argue for the futility, then the whole AS112  
> prefix could just as well be black-holed, since what the servers  
> mostly do is send negative answers to addresses whose reverse path  
> doesn't exist.
> I was just trying to be a bit more constructive. :-)

For my money, the ability to send a well-formed response to those  
clients for whom a reverse path does exist makes it worthwhile to  
tolerate the junk. Timeouts can mean service failure, on occasion,  
e.g. http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/nznog/2001-July/002956.html

There's always the argument that it's better to expose the brokenness  
so that it can be fixed, rather than hiding it, of course.


Joe