DNS Name Server Identifier (NSID) Option
RFC 5001
Network Working Group R. Austein
Request for Comments: 5001 ISC
Category: Standards Track August 2007
DNS Name Server Identifier (NSID) Option
Status of This Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).
Abstract
With the increased use of DNS anycast, load balancing, and other
mechanisms allowing more than one DNS name server to share a single
IP address, it is sometimes difficult to tell which of a pool of name
servers has answered a particular query. While existing ad-hoc
mechanisms allow an operator to send follow-up queries when it is
necessary to debug such a configuration, the only completely reliable
way to obtain the identity of the name server that responded is to
have the name server include this information in the response itself.
This note defines a protocol extension to support this functionality.
Austein Standards Track [Page 1]
RFC 5001 DNS NSID August 2007
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Reserved Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Resolver Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2. Name Server Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.3. The NSID Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.4. Presentation Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. The NSID Payload . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. NSID Is Not Transitive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.3. User Interface Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.4. Truncation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1. Introduction
With the increased use of DNS anycast, load balancing, and other
mechanisms allowing more than one DNS name server to share a single
IP address, it is sometimes difficult to tell which of a pool of name
servers has answered a particular query.
Existing ad-hoc mechanisms allow an operator to send follow-up
queries when it is necessary to debug such a configuration, but there
are situations in which this is not a totally satisfactory solution,
since anycast routing may have changed, or the server pool in
question may be behind some kind of extremely dynamic load balancing
hardware. Thus, while these ad-hoc mechanisms are certainly better
than nothing (and have the advantage of already being deployed), a
better solution seems desirable.
Given that a DNS query is an idempotent operation with no retained
state, it would appear that the only completely reliable way to
obtain the identity of the name server that responded to a particular
query is to have that name server include identifying information in
the response itself. This note defines a protocol enhancement to
achieve this.
Austein Standards Track [Page 2]
RFC 5001 DNS NSID August 2007
1.1. Reserved Words
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
2. Protocol
This note uses an EDNS [RFC2671] option to signal the resolver's
desire for information identifying the name server and to hold the
name server's response, if any.
2.1. Resolver Behavior
A resolver signals its desire for information identifying a name
server by sending an empty NSID option (Section 2.3) in an EDNS OPT
pseudo-RR in the query message.
The resolver MUST NOT include any NSID payload data in the query
message.
The semantics of an NSID request are not transitive. That is: the
presence of an NSID option in a query is a request that the name
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