[dsc] DSC and base64

[Pierre LEBRECH]

Duane Wessels wrote :
>
>
> On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Pierre LEBRECH wrote:
>
>> Question : what is it? I've never heard of base64 within DSC
>> documentation.
>
> Base64 is a method for encoding a string into another string that
> contains
> only "safe" or printable characters.
>
> DSC uses base64 encoding when a query name contains "special" characters
> because certain characters should not appear in the XML attribute value.
> This is mentioned in the user manual (around p34):
>
>     For some indexers these values are numeric, for others they
>     are strings.  If the value contains certain non-printable
>     characters, the string is base64-encoded and the optional
>     BASE64 attribute is set to 1.
>
> In your case, that particular query name was actually a URL.  You can
> see it with a command like this:
>
>   echo 'aHR0c ... h5LnBs' | /usr/local/lib/python2.5/base64.py -d | less
>
> Duane W.

Thanks Duane. Very interesting.
Could it be possible that such queries belong to normal DNS traffic? Are
they used for something? For me, it's quite strange to receive such queries!