Dear colleagues, Joe Abley and I have just submitted a draft (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-sullivan-dnsop-refer-down/) that is intended to capture the discussion here about referrals and how to describe them. It is intended for BCP, and it discourages upward referrals by authoritative servers.
That leaves the task of the referrals definition. I have some new text below: ---%<---cut here--- Referral: A type of response in which a server, signalling that it is not authoritative for an answer, provides the querying resolver with an alternative place to send its query. A referral contains an empty answer section. It contains the NS RRset for the referred-to zone in the authority section. It may contain RRs that provide addresses in the additional section. The AA bit is clear. There are two types of referral response. The first is a downward referral (sometimes described as "delegation response"), where the server is authoritative for some portion of the QNAME. The Authority section RRset's RDATA contains the name servers specified at the referred-to zone cut. In normal DNS operation, this kind of response is required in order to find names beneath a delegation. The second is an upward referral (sometimes described as "root referral" or just "referral response", as distinct from the delegation response above), where the server is not authoritative for any portion of the QNAME. When this happens, the referred-to zone in the Authority section is usually the root zone (.). In normal DNS operation, this kind of response is not strictly speaking required to work, and in practice some authoritative server operators will not return referral responses beyond those required for delegation. [optional: see draft-sullivan-dnsop-refer-down-00 or whatever. We'll only include this reference if the other draft reaches WG consensus before terminology-bis] ---cut here--->%--- Comments, please. Also, Joe and I solicit comments on the referrals draft proper, but it would be nice to put that in a different thread. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan a...@anvilwalrusden.com _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
