Subject: Re: dynamic update zone

From: Kevin Darcy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 12:13:37 -0400

Bill Sommerfeld wrote:

> > The rationale for this is that might be good to tell the updater that
> > the refusal is temporary as opposed to a violation of policy.  There
> > has been talk of using dynamic update in situations where direct
> > communications between the updater and the admin may be difficult
> > (which is why dynamic updates are in use).
>
> Is there any change in desired client retry behavior for REFUSED vs
> your proposed FROZEN?  I'm thinking mostly of the embedded/automatic
> case here..

As I understand it, REFUSED is a "permanent" error, i.e. the same
nameserver instance will continue to return REFUSED for the same request
unless it is reconfigured, whereas this new rcode would indicate a
temporary error that may succeed on a subsequent request without any
reconfiguration of the server. Client implementations should be encouraged
to use a sensible retry strategy, of course, in order to avoid hammering
the server.

I would prefer that such an rcode be general in nature, however, and not
limited to the Dynamic Update case. There might be situations where it
would be useful to temporarily "freeze" ordinary queries, zone transfers,
etc.

- Kevin

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From: Rob Austein <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 14:30:10 -0400

> to use a sensible retry strategy, of course, in order to avoid hammering

I think you're reading more into the spec than is there.  While I've
never heard of anyone bothering to do so, I don't think there's
anything in the spec that'd rule out a name server implementation that
returned REFUSED if and only if the system load average on the name
server's host over the seven minutes immediately prior to receiving
the query happened to have been above 0.84315315, or that returned
REFUSED on October 31 if and only if the moon was full.

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From: Danny Mayer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 20:32:59 -0400

>REFUSED on October 31 if and only if the moon was full.

I think that's overstating the case. The principle of least surprise should
always apply so that the number of possible reasons for the refusal be
limited to perfectly reasonable cases.

Danny