bmn? ? ?Premium,ExMod 2003-06
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hiatus | reply to Skippy25
Re: Who Cares? said by Skippy25:Again I do not see how this "breaks" DNS. »livehost.net/article168.html
See the section on authoritative servers for another reason this breaks DNS... Earthlink is acting as an authoritative server for zones it has no right to claim authority over. A clear violation of the DNS paradigm...
Just because another party took that error and turned it into something more meaningful to a vast majority of the internet users makes it no less of a negative DNS response. Incorrect because in the process of returning an error page, the Earthlink servers are returning false data on zones that don't exist. Once again, a violation of it's authority.
Now let's discuss another application attempting to use it and not being able to work properly because it doesn't get what it was programmed to get. DNS did just as it was supposed to do which is to indicate the namespace you are looking for does not exist. No, because to redirect the user to the cutesy page for a non-existent domain, Earthlink will return an IP address. In DNS terms, when you receive an address for a name, you are essentially saying that the lookup was successful, which in this case is incorrect.
Unfortunately the mail application couldn't interpret the response properly while any web browser could. Sounds like a mail application problem to me and the application should be fixed or the administrator of the mail server should change their method for resolving addresses. (like maybe using different DNS servers) Not no, but hell no... Your solution violates the standards of internet. All that does is shift the responsibility to the people who aren't breaking the rules to accommodate the people who are violating the rules. There is no good reason that I should have to patch all of my mail servers because one rogue company decides it knows better than the majority of the experts in the field.
Now lets discuss the... it's always been that way and we can't change it argument. This is called innovation and evolution of technology. So find something else petty to complain about. This isn't innovation and it isn't the evolution of technology... This is a company going rogue with respect to the rules and standards of the internet. There's a reason those standards and rules are in place.
I'm sorry you view this as a "petty" thing to argue about, but the fact that at least three network/systems admin-type people (including myself) have said that this is wrong indicates that there is something seriously wrong with doing this.
Like I said, any systems/network admin worth his salt isn't going to side with you on this issue for the reasons already outlined.
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Ann Coulter doesn't know jack about science...
"Extremes to the right and left of any political dispute are always wrong." —Dwight Eisenhower |
