Entry

What support does djbdns have for RP or SRV or other newer record types?

Nov 13th, 2001 13:49
Brian Coogan,

Djbdns supports newer/'unknown' record types -- it will happily pass 
them through dnscache and allows you to define them for your tinydns 
content server.  ('unknown' in this context means new to djbdns)
Firstly, tinydns provides support for definition of generic record 
types through the ":" data line.  The definition may contain arbitrary 
binary bytes through the use of octal escapes.  Axfrget will pull down 
zones containing unknown record types, encoding them in : dataline 
format for use in tinydns.
For instance, an example RP record (domain cna.com.au, responsible 
person being brian@coogan.com) ready for use in the tinydns data file 
is:
  :cna.com.au:17:\005brian\006coogan\003com\000\000
In the versions of Bind that support it, the matching Bind definition 
would be:
  cna.com.au  IN      RP      brian.coogan.com
The tinydns : data line is documented in:
  http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tinydns-data.html  (search for 'generic')
Rob Mayoff's web-based tinydns record maker creates both SRV records 
and RP records:
  http://dqd.com/~mayoff/tools/djbdns/make-record.adp
Secondly, dnscache supports unknown record types transparently.  It 
caches them and passes them on appropriately.  For instance, this works 
for SRV, RP, AAAA records and probably anything else you can think of.  
[No doubt there are limitations to this, obviously the records would 
have to be RFC compliant, but other than that I'm not sure and couldn't 
find anything more detailed]
Note: this is a big difference when compared to Bind.  Most (all?) 
versions of Bind will not serve record types they don't know about and 
this means they don't interact well with Windows 2000 which requires 
SRV records.
Dan Bernstein's more detailed analysis of this issue is at:
   http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/newtypes.html