RFC8482 – Saying Goodbye to ANY
Even though I know how it works, and why it works, I'm still kind of surprised that individual DNS records have individual TTLs. It feels unfamiliar/alien, compared to all the other hierarchy-of-caches systems I work with.<p>Every intuition I have about caching would lead me to imagine an alternative implementation of DNS where zones are documents, and intermediate resolvers retrieve and cache entire zone documents from their canonical hosts, in order to respond to queries for individual records from stub resolvers.<p>Is there some big use-case for the DNS records within a zone to have different TTLs? Would it really be so inefficient if the zone as a whole just had one TTL, which was set as the minimum of the TTLs required by any of its records?<p>Does DNS not have spacial locality to its access patterns? I.e., if an intermediate resolver retrieves the A records for a domain, does that not imply that it'll soon also want the MX records for that domain, and the TXT SPF records, and—essentially—all the records with some probability? Is there no justification for pre-fetching these?<p>And, if both of those statements were to be true—that DNS could get by just fine with one TTL per zone, and that DNS queries do have a spacially-local access pattern—then why would you want to design DNS in a way where intermediate resolvers retrieve individual records, rather than entire zone documents? Would a modern ground-up DNS architecture do things this way?<p>(I have the suspicion that the answer lies in security-through-obscurity, vis. the reason AXFRs are prohibited. So, as an addendum: I ask the same questions as above, but this time presuming your DNS daemon has Row-Based Access Control (RBAC), such that an intermediate resolver retrieving a zone document would only see the records its upstream resolver thinks that particular client should be allowed to see—e.g. enterprise Intranet clients get everything, while public Internet clients get a trimmed view. This implies secure DNS, but just take that as a given.)