Re: Poison in a zone

["D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>]

Dean Anderson writes:
> I'll write up the draft with these changes, if you agree.

The existing draft was shoved into Last Call with huge problems. I'm
still waiting for it to be withdrawn (or rejected).

There are obviously bigger problems here than clarification of the AXFR
protocol. The discussion has revealed a huge gap between

   * RFC 1034, which simplifies software but demands that administrators
     maintain exact glue consistency, and

   * the ``zone coherency'' cult, which removes some administrative
     requirements (but not all) while demanding that AXFR clients (but
     not other clients) maintain exact copies of zones no matter how
     inconsistent those zones are---a rule that even BIND 9 violates.

The real world is somewhere between these extremes. Perhaps we can have
a rational cost-benefit discussion, now that BIND 9's disobedience of
the cult has been exposed.

Meanwhile, http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/axfr-notes.html covers several issues
that aren't covered in axfr-clarify.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago