Subject: Re: should a pure recursor know about localhost/1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa?

From: Tony Finch <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 13:00:34 +0100

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, bert hubert wrote:
>
> The recursor of PowerDNS is a pure recursor and has zero authoritative
> facilities, so I've added some hardcoded support for localhost and
> 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa.
>
> But I wonder if this is right and proper? And, if it is, should I hardcode
> the IPv6 equivalents as well?

Shouldn't it know about all the relevant RFC 3330 nets, to prevent bogus
queries from loading the root or AS112?

Tony.
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---

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 14:07:04 +0200

On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 01:38:10PM +0200,
 bert hubert <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 28 lines which said:

> But I wonder if this is right and proper? 

RFC 1912 says so and our Zonecheck tool tests it:

   Certain zones should always be present in nameserver configurations:

           primary         localhost               localhost
           primary         0.0.127.in-addr.arpa    127.0
           primary         255.in-addr.arpa        255
           primary         0.in-addr.arpa          0

   These are set up to either provide nameservice for "special"
   addresses, or to help eliminate accidental queries for broadcast or
   local address to be sent off to the root nameservers.  All of these
   files will contain NS and SOA records just like the other zone files
   you maintain, the exception being that you can probably make the SOA
   timers very long, since this data will never change.

   The "localhost" address is a "special" address which always refers to
   the local host.  It should contain the following line:

           localhost.      IN      A       127.0.0.1

   The "127.0" file should contain the line:

           1    PTR     localhost.

   There has been some extensive discussion about whether or not to
   append the local domain to it.  The conclusion is that "localhost."
   would be the best solution.  The reasons given include:

      "localhost" by itself is used and expected to work in some
      systems.

      Translating 127.0.0.1 into "localhost.dom.ain" can cause some
      software to connect back to the loopback interface when it didn't
      want to because "localhost" is not equal to "localhost.dom.ain".

   The "255" and "0" files should not contain any additional data beyond
   the NS and SOA records.

   Note that future BIND versions may include all or some of this data
   automatically without additional configuration.

---

From: Paul Vixie <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 15:05:28 +0000

as the developer of several caching recursive nameservers, i can tell you
that the user community for them generally MUST have the ability to hardcode
localhost and its PTR's, in ipv4 and ipv6 space; also some NS RRs for rfc1918
PTRs (to avoid hitting AS112); also some NS RRs for their own local zones
(to be able to resolve their own names when their transit pipe is down.)  as
attractive as it is to do a "pure" nameserver with nearly zero config, it's
unrealistic in today's polluted local namespaces.