Re: [Q] DNS(bind) ER model

On Aug 15, 2008, at 12:16 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 07:44:36AM -0700, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
>
>> Thanks again.  This is a pretty specialized application (at this
>> time) so
>> the RRTYPEs used are limited.  I am trying to make the model and Pg
>> implementation as generic as possible in case it gets released into
>> the
>> wild later.
>
> I made the mistake in the past of not supporting the unknown type, and
> regretted it.  The nice thing about implementing unknown is that you
> can automatically add another RR later, even if you're not sure what
> it's supposed to look like.

+1

>> plus the company I'm doing this for gets some strange requests from
>> their
>> customers -- not always correct or logical.  :-(
>
> We DNS geeks have seen every mistake in the book, and some of the
> worst ideas are still being developed.  (In Dublin, I heard someone
> from the DKIM working group at last suggest that maybe using the TXT
> RRTYPE wasn't such a hot idea.  I think it's now 5 years since the DNS
> folks pointed out that TXT was going to cause headaches later.  Sigh.)

The DKIM people have been pointing that out for at least as long.

Guess why they still went with the TXT record? Mostly because of the
number of lame self-service DNS interfaces that don't support much
apart from A, MX, CNAME and TXT. (To bring it on-topic, mostly
because they use very simplistic database backends, I suspect...)

Back to the original problem... I'm not sure there's a generic good
structure for DNS data, it'd depend a lot on what you were planning
on doing with it. Serving DNS directly out of the database is
a very different set of needs to basic self-service management, which
is a different set of needs to enterprise intranet DNS and so on.

Cheers,
   Steve