Re: bind() udp behavior 2.6.8.1

From: Adam Denenberg
Date: Thu Dec 16 2004 - 10:03:58 EST


Ok thanks for all the help.

One final note before i end this (since there still seems to be some misunderstanding) is that the reply comes back successful for the first of the 2 redundant transaction IDs. Its not a retransmit. ID 101 gets sent from the linux box and receives a response successfully. It then sends another reqeust with ID 101 _after_ it received the response for 101. That is my issue and that is what is breaking the communication thru the firewall. It should be using a new ID after a successful dns transaction but it is not.

I understand this has deviated from the topic of the linux kernel so we can consider this thread dead.

thanks everybody for all their input and help.

adam

On Dec 16, 2004, at 9:51 AM, Jan Harkes wrote:

On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 09:24:59AM -0500, Adam Denenberg wrote:
I disagree. The linux server should be using unique Transaction ID's
in the dns header for each unique dns request. Otherwise there is no
way to distinguish them (same A record request). Of course the
firewall is going to drop a reply that it thinks it already saw a reply
for 30ms ago.

This appears to be a bug in the way glibc is handling things but i
cannot be sure. That is the goal of my investigation.

Ok, please stop it and _read_ the email, completely, a possible solution
will be at the end.

This is not a problem with the linux kernel, the application (resolver
library) is simply retransmitting the request and the kernel does
exactly as it is told. So first of all this is completely off-topic for
linux-kernel.

Second of all, it is -not- a glibc issue either. The reply packet was
probably lost after it has passed through the firewall but before it
reached the DNS client machine. So since it has not yet received the
response it is doing the right thing, retransmitting the request.

The problem is... your firewall, it seems to assume that once it has
seen a UDP reply packet that this packet will reach the destination and
the session is closed. This is an incorrect assumption since UDP is per
definition a lossy protocol (unreliable datagram protocol) and the
packet can and will be dropped by any routers, switches, the network
card in your machine, or even by the kernel if there is too much
traffic or a single bit error which makes the checksum fail.

One solution that might work is to run a local caching DNS daemon on a
machine behind the firewall (bind, dnsmasq or something) and set
/etc/resolv.conf to only send requests to the local machine. The local
caching daemon can then forward those requests from a known fixed local
port to your upstream DNS servers. This allows you to open a hole in the
firewall between local_dns_cache:53 and upstream_dns_server:53.

Jan


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