Hi all, Some of you will perhaps recall that previous efforts at text on referrals were unsuccessful. I've had another go. I _think_ it addresses all the comments so far, without actually causing the terminology draft to drift into prescribing protocol. It is unfortunately quite a bit longer, but that seems to be the cost of making all the points from the discussion. Thoughts are solicited:
Referral: A type of response in which a server, signalling that it is not (completely) authoritative for an answer, provides the querying resolver with an alternative place to send its query. Referrals can be combined with partial answers. A referral arises when a server is not performing recursive service while answering a query. It appears in step 3(b) of the algorithm in [RFC1034], Section 4.3.2. 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 bare use of "referral" means this kind of referral, and many people believe that this is the only legitimate kind of referral in the DNS. The second is an upward referral (sometimes described as "root referral"), 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 required for resolution or for correctly answering any query. There is no requirement that servers send them. Some people regard upward referrals as a sign of a misconfiguration or error. A response that has only 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. In the case where the query matches an alias, and the server is not authoritative for the target of the alias but it is authoritative for some name above the target of the alias, the resolution algorithm will produce a response that contains both the authoritative answer for the alias, and also a referral. Such a partial answer and referral response has data in the answer section. It has 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 set, because the first name in the answer section matches the QNAME and the server is authoritative for that answer (see [RFC1035], section 4.1.1). -- Andrew Sullivan a...@anvilwalrusden.com _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop