[dns-operations] Announcement - DNS flag day on 2019-02-01

[Robert]

On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 6:22 PM, Paul Vixie <paul at redbarn.org> wrote:
> we should probably not, ever, have put in any EDNS workarounds. let it fail
> and start the shouting and finger pointing early. generally speaking, if AWS
> customers see less web traffic, AWS will fix their DNS.

Isn't that what Michael's question is though? My reading of the flag
day is it removes the work-arounds in resolver software for DNS
systems which drop EDNS0 queries.  The DNS flag day website links to a
tool which flags all EDNS faults with authoritative nameservers and
specifically states: "must be green message All Ok". Is that actually
true for the action being taken on 2019-02-01?

My reading of the website leads me to believe after the work-arounds
are removed authoritative nameservers which respond to EDNS1 with
anything other than BADVERS will still work just fine. I don't think
the intention behind the statement "not seeing any clear customer
benefit in fixing this in the next few months" is the same as "don’t
have time to do this". The former statement, to me, is asking for a
why when it appears there will be no impact for not correctly
responding to EDNS1.

The why on this one seems to be "As a protocol designer and DNS
resolver software maintainer, I would like to develop and implement
EDNS1 which requires at present time DNS authorities respond to EDNS1
queries with BADVERS". There's probably more to it than that, like why
customers would want EDNS1 or what in general you're trying to
accomplish (pro tip: referencing a case where you were able to live
without it is not really a selling point). But I'm sure if there was a
version 0 of something, we'd probably want a version 1 at some point,
and it isn't really shocking behaviour to return an error when
presented with a version you're not expecting (I'm thinking of how
this works with HTTP versions).

Ultimately, I like new technology, DNS is spiffy, and I appreciate the
work everyone does on moving our quirky Internet forward and needs and
use cases change. Thanks (seriously, I'm not being glib). I do think
efforts and messaging like this on the list does a disservice to the
very initiatives you're trying to accomplish by conflating issues and
making it look like you're trying to push forward an agenda which has
no clear use case.

My suggestion is you clarify what the DNS flag day actually will
impact and provide guidance on how to interpret the results of the
validation tool to untangle the two issues: DNS systems which drop all
EDNS queries, and BADVERS for EDNS1.