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From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains
Subject: Re: BOGUS ROOT SERVERS!!
Message-ID: <1990Nov14.021301.29146@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 14 Nov 90 02:13:01 GMT
References: <9163@ncar.ucar.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 35

In article <9163@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes:
>We are having a serious problem with our name servers that APPEARS to be
>related to bogus root server data that is coming in from God knows where.
>Our configuration is that we have a primary server (ncar.ucar.edu a.k.a.
>(....)
>
>What happens is that when a machine is rebooted (or named is restarted), it
>goes into an infinite loop burning tons of CPU time and refusing to answer
>(....)
>queries. It also ignores all signals (except 9, of course) which makes
>debugging a real pain. Empirical evidence shows that every time this has
>happened, I find the following bogus root servers in both the primary and
>secondary servers' caches:
>
>Has anyone else seen this? Does anyone have any idea what the &^$%#@! is going

  Probably lots of people have seen the bogus records.  They didn't cause
any loops on our system, but we did have to kill and restart named to remove
them from the cache.  (Come to think of it, maybe it is about time I rechecked
the cache to see if they have reappeared).

>Before I dive into the source code, I'd like to ask: is there any reason why
>data about the root domain coming in from outside should EVER be believed
>and cached?  Has anyone patched BIND to disallow this? Will I break the entire
>DNS if I do this here? :-)
>
  If the data comes from one of the root servers, it should be believed and
cached.  (Alas, at one stage a root server was putting out these bogus
records - it had been contaminated too).

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115.                                  +1-815-753-6940