RE: [idn] Reality Check

["Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@walid.com>]

| The application does not talk to the DNS server.  The application talks
| to the resolver, and the resolver talks to the DNS server.  The DNS
| protocol matters to servers and resolvers, but not applications.  (Am I
| wrong about this?  Are there applications that speak DNS directly?  More
| than a negligible number of them?)

  MTAs (sendmail, etc.) generate MX lookups directly instead of through the
resolver.

  DNS tools such as dnsquery and dig (and the venerable but deprecated
nslookup) generate their DNS packets directly, but aren't really much of an
issue (and can be easily wrapped).

  Anything that uses DNS data but doesn't do get{host|node}by{name|addr}
doesn't use the system resolver.

  -bws