[dns-operations] Anyone from AWS here?

[Mark Andrews]

In message <CAAF6GDeuOgTQi0A_gucUbi4J=VYk=xhNmrZrJi6GUdQQAP3d6A at mail.gmail.com>
, =?UTF-8?Q?Colm_MacC=C3=A1rthaigh?= writes:
> On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 6:28 PM, Mark Andrews <marka at isc.org> wrote:
> >
> > It appears that AWS uses octal escape sequences in their interface
> > instead of the industry standard decimal escapes as specified in
> > STD 13 (RFC 1035).
> >
> > https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=674778
> 
> AWS people are here, I'm pretty sure I wrote the code that's parsing
> this, around 7 years ago!  I remember the decision to go with octal.
> We decided based on talking to customers, what their preferences are,
> and what they would find least surprising. In fact we started with the
> first customer who needed it.
> 
> The Route 53 API is an XML web services API, called from SDKs that are
> available for several languages. Customer feedback was pretty
> universal that octal or hex would be least confusing, with octal being
> the least ambiguous. This is the behavior they are used to in the
> languages they are calling our API from. The job of the Route 53 API
> after all is to translate programmer intent from their source
> language, to DNS records that they can then query.
> 
> That means we're caught between two different 'standard' worlds which
> occasionally conflict, the programming ones, and the DNS ones. In this
> case, few customers seem to be familiar with the DNS RFCs, or the
> particulars of zone files, so their preference was to go with the
> programming standards.
>
> The zone import/export tools do escaping consistent with the RFCs,
> where zone-file inter-operability is relevant, and of course
> everything is correct on-the-wire.

Well could you at least update the documentation on that page to say
that this escaping is not the standard escaping of DNS names which
uses \DDD.

> -- 
> Colm
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org