What if you *only* have glue, and no authoritative answer / server?
Can I register
example.com, put in
www.example.com A
192.0.2.1 as
glue, and not bother with this whole annoying authoritative server
thing?
I asked this back in 2014, and was (correctly) told that this should
not work - I was pointed at RFC2181, which says:
"Unauthenticated RRs received and cached from the least trustworthy of
those groupings, that is data from the additional data section, and
data from the authority section of a non-authoritative answer, should
not be cached in such a way that they would ever be returned as
answers to a received query. They may be returned as additional
information where appropriate. Ignoring this would allow the
trustworthiness of relatively untrustworthy data to be increased
without cause or excuse."
I did some testing on this back in late 2014, and the "success" rate
was ~75% - this has now dropped to ~5% (using Atlas to measure).
What on earth am I talking about? For the domain
wow4dns.com, I have
*only* got glue (answers edited for brevity):
$ dig +nostat +nocmd ns
wow4dns.com @
a.gtld-servers.com ;; QUESTION SECTION:
;
wow4dns.com. IN NS
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
wow4dns.com. 172800 IN NS
www.wow4dns.com.
wow4dns.com. 172800 IN NS
www1.wow4dns.com.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
www.wow4dns.com. 172800 IN A
193.151.173.35 www1.wow4dns.com. 172800 IN A
193.151.173.35There is no name-server listening on
193.151.173.35:
$ dig
www.wow4dns.com @
193.151.173.35 ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
There is, just for giggles, a webserver...
Using 1000 RIPE Atlas nodes, I try to resolve the name
www.wow4dns.com-- according to RFC2181 this Should Not Work(tm) -- and yet, ~3-5% of
resolvers (in this run, 38 out of 984) will resolve it, and to the
correct IP. This is RIPE Measurement #25400908 [0] for those who want
to play along at home...
The majority of these resolvers are in RFC1918 space, but there are
also some public addresses, including open recursives - e.g:
$ dig
www.wow4dns.com @
37.32.120.136 www.wow4dns.com. 86037 IN A
193.151.173.35 $ host
37.32.120.136 136.120.32.37.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer
ns1.systec.ir.
$ dig
www.wow4dns.com @
185.210.180.6 www.wow4dns.com. 84737 IN A
193.151.173.35 $ host
185.210.180.6 6.180.210.185.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer
ns2.txtv-tz.com.
Looking in the webserver log, there are also some hits - e.g:
- - [21/May/2020:19:09:10 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 209
"
http://www.wow4dns.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X
10_15_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4044.138
Safari/537.36"
What does all of this *mean*?
.
.
.
Sorry, I haven't a clue, other than maybe:
The DNS is weird.
We passed the complexity event horizon a long time back...
W