Subject: RCODEs in EDNS

From: James Gilroy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 17:51:12 -0800

One issue that i've always found annoying, that i'd like to see cleaned up
in EDNS is the overloading of the NO_ERROR RCODE in queries.

Currently NO_ERROR can mean
	-- have an answer
	-- empty auth response (name exists, RR set doesn't)
	-- referral

To correctly distinguish the later two response from some BIND
implementations, involves testing a bunch of bits or further parsing the
packet.  (It was never clear to me why empty auth response didn't have an
RCODE to begin with as name error did.)

I think it would be a useful service -- primarily to implementors, but also
to anyone diagnosing problems, looking at traces, etc. -- to clean this up
now.

I'd propose using
	NXRRSET -> empty auth response (that's exactly what it means in the
update case)
	NOTAUTH -> referral (sorta captures the idea)

The idea would be that EDNS aware implementations would just tack these onto
the revelant case statements in their packet parsers and do whatever
processing they now do when they detect these conditions by the appropriate
set of tests.

	jim

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---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 14:32:23 +1100

What's the point in doing it?

	Servers and clients are still going to have to do it the
	old way when talking to old client and servers so the code
	to do this has to exist.

	In general having only one way to do something leads to less
	errors.

	Mark

--
Mark Andrews, Nominum Inc. / Internet Software Consortium
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: [email-masked]