On Mon, 04 Oct 2010 19:02:04 +0200, Beat Siegenthaler beat.siegenthaler@beatsnet.com said:
On 04.10.10 15:04, Benoit Panizzon wrote:
Hello
I quite often stumble over DNS entries without SOA.
Indeed, this also new for me. at least BIND won't serve zones without SOA-Record..
Found something about it here: REDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY IN DNS http://www.iadis.net/dl/final_uploads/200817L019.pdf
Just a quote here:
"Zones without SOA or wrong SOA We were surprised to see that there are zones without SOA RRs, e.g., 888melody.info. This strengthens our claim that one could use DNS without any SOA records. SOA RRs are useless since email address can be found in RP (responsible person RR) and timings are not longer needed since the notification mechanism is used by default. The start of zone can be determined through delegation from a parent zone. As seen in the previous section, the name server is also actually considered optional."
Sigh. People who don't really understand DNS should not write documents like this.
For one thing, SOA records are used in the authority section of negative answers to allow caching of such responses.
(And NS records in the child zone are certainly not optional, because the child is authoritative for them, not the parent.)
Just because many people make these mistakes doesn't mean that it's correct.