Vixie: What DNS Is Not

Over at the ACM Queue, Paul Vixie writes about what he calls "stupid DNS tricks". These include various schemes by ISPs and others to "monetize" DNS traffic in some way. "Not all misuses of DNS take the form of lying. Another frequently seen abuse is to treat DNS as a directory system, which it is not. In a directory system one can ask approximate questions and get approximate answers. Think of a printed telephone white pages directory here: users often find what they want in the printed directory not by knowing exactly what the listing is but by starting with a guess or a general idea. DNS has nothing like that: all questions and all answers are exact. But DNS has at least two mechanisms that can be misused to support approximate matching at some considerable cost to everybody else, and a lot of that goes on." (thanks to Jay R. Ashworth).

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