Re: TTL From Parent or Child Zone?

On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 11:47:34AM -0500, Simon Casady wrote:
> I can't confirm it today because I am using Sprint and they intercept
> and redirect all dns queries to their own strange servers but
> nytimes.com had a configuration that increased the load on dns.  The
> first time you queried for www.nytimes.com you find the addresses for
> their name servers with a reasonable timeout but they are discarded
> and replaced with info with very short ttl's by additional records
> included with the answer for www.nytimes.com.
> The result is each query has to go back to the root to find the NS. If
> dnscache did not replace the authoritative answer with the additional
> non-authoritative data, less load !

Since this seems to be the result intended by the clowns in charge of
nytimes.com, it seems that dnscache is behaving exactly as it should.

It would be wrong as well as stupid to "fix" dnscache's behavior to
ignore deliberately misconfigured crap.  I don't know why they think
that 60 seconds is the appropriate ttl for a name server, but since
that's what they give you, that's what you have to work with.  Almost
every query will have to go to the GTLD servers...  That's life.