[dns-operations] The Python 3 socket.getaddrinfo() Case Sensitivity Problem

[m3047]

TLDR: I applied some OS updates and now can't reproduce the problem. Sorry
to be saying this, not sorry to see the problem gone. If it comes back, 
I'll spend some more time tracking it down.

That is a locally minted TLD, and for the record there is a searchlist 
which ends with a wildcarded _valid_ domain, hence a valid IP4 address 
rather than NXDOMAIN (but not the correct one); it's trying to resolve the 
address of a machine hosting Redis internally and that's what the Redis 
Python client's code looks like. The actual name in the zone file is
uppercased ("SOPHIA") and dig returns it as "SOPHIA.m3047".

Perl / C / Python: Using dnspython works. Hence the workaround I gave a 
link to. I suspect a problem in the underlying libraries (not Python per 
se) but haven't pursued it. (SuSE Leap 15.0 x86_64, BIND 9.12.3 compiled 
locally.)

It is resolved correctly via a domain that the local caching resolver(s) 
serve authoritatively. dig resolves it correctly, from that box, even as 
Redis fails. It even worked correctly some of the time, from that box. But 
not all the time.

I'd hate to see case sensitivity become the new newly invented old 
problem. I don't know of another place which discusses global naming 
schemes and operational problems therewith separate from running name 
servers. I'd like to think that DNS is a sane choice for internal 
directory services in the datacenter, and if that's not the case then 
where does the cohort of people to run _The_ DNS come from?

--

Fred Morris

On Thu, 4 Jul 2019, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 04, 2019 at 02:46:21PM -0700, Fred Morris wrote:
>
>> Today I bring to you the Python3 socket implementation, which appears to
>> be case sensitive when doing DNS resolutions:
>>
>>     # python3
>>     python> from socket import getaddrinfo
>>     python> getaddrinfo('sophia.m3047',6379)
>
> That does not look like a DNS FQDN.  How is that name resolved?  Is
> it via /etc/hosts?  Surely python3 just calls the C-library
> getaddrinfo() and return its results, in which case any case-sensitivity
> is not Python's fault.  Have you tried Perl?  Or a C program?