• Baptiste Jonglez's avatar
    Stop treating SERVFAIL as a successful response from upstream servers. · 68f6312d
    Baptiste Jonglez authored
    This effectively reverts most of 51967f98 ("SERVFAIL is an expected
    error return, don't try all servers.") and 4ace25c5 ("Treat REFUSED (not
    SERVFAIL) as an unsuccessful upstream response").
    
    With the current behaviour, as soon as dnsmasq receives a SERVFAIL from an
    upstream server, it stops trying to resolve the query and simply returns
    SERVFAIL to the client.  With this commit, dnsmasq will instead try to
    query other upstream servers upon receiving a SERVFAIL response.
    
    According to RFC 1034 and 1035, the semantic of SERVFAIL is that of a
    temporary error condition.  Recursive resolvers are expected to encounter
    network or resources issues from time to time, and will respond with
    SERVFAIL in this case.  Similarly, if a validating DNSSEC resolver [RFC
    4033] encounters issues when checking signatures (unknown signing
    algorithm, missing signatures, expired signatures because of a wrong
    system clock, etc), it will respond with SERVFAIL.
    
    Note that all those behaviours are entirely different from a negative
    response, which would provide a definite indication that the requested
    name does not exist.  In our case, if an upstream server responds with
    SERVFAIL, another upstream server may well provide a positive answer for
    the same query.
    
    Thus, this commit will increase robustness whenever some upstream servers
    encounter temporary issues or are misconfigured.
    
    Quoting RFC 1034, Section 4.3.1. "Queries and responses":
    
        If recursive service is requested and available, the recursive response
        to a query will be one of the following:
    
           - The answer to the query, possibly preface by one or more CNAME
             RRs that specify aliases encountered on the way to an answer.
    
           - A name error indicating that the name does not exist.  This
             may include CNAME RRs that indicate that the original query
    	  name was an alias for a name which does not exist.
    
           - A temporary error indication.
    
    Here is Section 5.2.3. of RFC 1034, "Temporary failures":
    
        In a less than perfect world, all resolvers will occasionally be unable
        to resolve a particular request.  This condition can be caused by a
        resolver which becomes separated from the rest of the network due to a
        link failure or gateway problem, or less often by coincident failure or
        unavailability of all servers for a particular domain.
    
    And finally, RFC 1035 specifies RRCODE 2 for this usage, which is now more
    widely known as SERVFAIL (RFC 1035, Section 4.1.1. "Header section format"):
    
        RCODE           Response code - this 4 bit field is set as part of
                        responses.  The values have the following
                        interpretation:
                        (...)
    
                        2               Server failure - The name server was
                                        unable to process this query due to a
                                        problem with the name server.
    
    For the DNSSEC-related usage of SERVFAIL, here is RFC 4033
    Section 5. "Scope of the DNSSEC Document Set and Last Hop Issues":
    
        A validating resolver can determine the following 4 states:
        (...)
    
        Insecure: The validating resolver has a trust anchor, a chain of
           trust, and, at some delegation point, signed proof of the
           non-existence of a DS record.  This indicates that subsequent
           branches in the tree are provably insecure.  A validating resolver
           may have a local policy to mark parts of the domain space as
           insecure.
    
        Bogus: The validating resolver has a trust anchor and a secure
           delegation indicating that subsidiary data is signed, but the
           response fails to validate for some reason: missing signatures,
           expired signatures, signatures with unsupported algorithms, data
           missing that the relevant NSEC RR says should be present, and so
           forth.
        (...)
    
        This specification only defines how security-aware name servers can
        signal non-validating stub resolvers that data was found to be bogus
        (using RCODE=2, "Server Failure"; see [RFC4035]).
    
    Notice the difference between a definite negative answer ("Insecure"
    state), and an indefinite error condition ("Bogus" state).  The second
    type of error may be specific to a recursive resolver, for instance
    because its system clock has been incorrectly set, or because it does not
    implement newer cryptographic primitives.  Another recursive resolver may
    succeed for the same query.
    
    There are other similar situations in which the specified behaviour is
    similar to the one implemented by this commit.
    
    For instance, RFC 2136 specifies the behaviour of a "requestor" that wants
    to update a zone using the DNS UPDATE mechanism.  The requestor tries to
    contact all authoritative name servers for the zone, with the following
    behaviour specified in RFC 2136, Section 4:
    
        4.6. If a response is received whose RCODE is SERVFAIL or NOTIMP, or
        if no response is received within an implementation dependent timeout
        period, or if an ICMP error is received indicating that the server's
        port is unreachable, then the requestor will delete the unusable
        server from its internal name server list and try the next one,
        repeating until the name server list is empty.  If the requestor runs
        out of servers to try, an appropriate error will be returned to the
        requestor's caller.
    68f6312d
forward.c 64.4 KB