Hi Yuri,

On 7 Mar 2019, at 11:19, Yuri via Unbound-users <unbound-users@nlnetlabs.nl> 
wrote:

>> 2. explain why you need it in Unbound.
> 
> WCCP supports not only 80 port, but also 53 (and any arbitrary port) ans
> very useful for transparent interception any traffic and locally cache
> it on separate server.
> 
> Thus, technology can drastically reduce outboud internet traffic and/or
> increases LAN security.

I was an early beta-tester of cisco's original cache engine back in the 90s, 
back when I think the programme was being run by Barry Greene out of Singapore. 
Transparent caching of web objects made a lot of sense for us since we were 
severely bandwidth-constrained in New Zealand in advance of southern cross 
being lit. There were all kinds of bandwidth-conserving shenanigans going on at 
the time.

However, I don't know that the same advantages would have existed (or do exist, 
today) for the DNS.

DNS is not generally a significant contributor to traffic volume so long as the 
DDoS klaxons are not sounding, so the "reduce outbound internet traffic" 
argument is not especially compelling (nor inbound; I'm not sure why you call 
out outbound). Increasing LAN security is even more dubious, I think.

In general, DNS involves a number of subtly different protocols, all 
co-specified but not the same. Transparently proxying a query intended for an 
authoritative server to a resolver can cause problems (e.g. with RD and AA 
signalling). Delivering a DNS UPDATE message to the wrong server is going to 
break the intended behaviour. The only really safe way to avoid these kinds of 
pitfalls is to not do transparent proxying at all.

If the goal was to use WCCP as a clustering technique without transparent 
proxying, hashing the (QNAME, QCLASS, QTYPE) tuple across a set of origin 
servers in order to minimise cache misses, that might be interesting, but it's 
not clear to me that WCCP is the right way to do that (but perhaps I'm not 
thinking hard enough about it).


Joe

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