Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 03:03:12 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: daved@nostrum.com, stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Resolver Issues (non valid hostname characters) Message-ID: <3E803770.1DD7FD0@mindspring.com>
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David J Duchscher wrote: > It seems that the use of invalid characters in hostnames is cropping > up more and more. Besides complaining to the offending site which > often doesn't work, I was wondering if these restrictions on FreeBSD > should be re-examined. At this time, it seems that many OSes are no > longer enforcing this requirement or never have. In my case, I am > running into a hostnames with an underscore character in the name. It > seems that Linux, MacOS X, Solaris and Windows all allow this hostname > to resolve but FreeBSD, as well as the other *BSD, reject it. Should > FreeBSD follow suit? Welcome to DNSINT. Specifically, restrictions were relaxed on the root level servers; this was generally announced about a month ago. All data is 8-bit now, but not all DNS servers can handle it (e.g. try putting a tab or space or whatever in a zone name, which is now legal). The root servers were mostly switched over to totally different software from bind. 8-(. The specific reasons were for support of Big5 due to increased political pressure coming from China. See the ICANN web site for details. Personally, I think it's to make it harder to cut-and-paste domain names from SPAM to find the responsible party (chars in Big5 don't go over very well in ISO 8859-1, and end up being shell escapes, etc.). The answer is that it will have to be supported when DNSINT is supported (but nit until then; significant resolver library changes, which are not easy, are required, etc.). It's probably not very useful to talk about doing this until local caching-only name servers on border servers are capable of handling the 8-bit, as well. For the RFC's that FreeBSD currently complies with, it's right to be strict about this. Mostly it's still about domain name speculation, and, IMO, will be for a while. I'd say it's about as widely adopted as IPv6 -- which is to say: not very. PS: I was on the DNSINT IETF working group for a while, FWIW. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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