North American Network Operators Group

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Re: www.worldnet.att.net Network not in table

  • From: Brett Frankenberger
  • Date: Sun Apr 13 11:57:34 2003

On Sun, Apr 13, 2003 at 03:32:39PM +0200, Michael Hallgren wrote:
> 
> > So far as I know, www.worldnet.att.net is intended to be reachable only
> > from Worldnet dialups.  204.127.0.0/17 is not advertised to the Internet
> > at large.  www.att.net is in 204.127.128.0/17 and is reachable from
> > anywhere.
> 
> If so is (which appears to be the case), for what reason is the
> (global) DNS populated with corresponding data? Somewhat harmless,
> but fairly easy to clean up (via, for example, DNS configuration
> views) -- for making things more beautiful.

I've never been a fan of split DNS views, because it makes assumptions
about what DNS servers people are using.  What if a worldnet customer,
say, wants to run a recursive named on his own machine, and handle his
own lookups?  Then he is, necessarily, going to get the "global" view
all the time, even when he's dialed in to Worldnet.  So it makes sense
for "only reachable from worldnet" stuff to be globally viewable.

And what if you're connected to multiple "private" networks, each with
their own DNS, at once?  Then you've got to pick which private names
you want to see, and point at the appropriate DNS ...

I realize a lot of organizations split up their DNS views (and because
of NAT, some pretty much have to) ... but I've always been of the
opinion that a single DNS is the way to go -- it eliminates all the
"well, you can only see that name if you're using this DNS" problems.

     -- Brett