djbwares version 9

From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups_at_NTLWorld.COM>
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 09:51:16 +0000

The djbwares package is now up to version 9 .

  *

    http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/djbwares/

  *

    http://jdebp.info./Softwares/djbwares/

This version sees changes to the doco and to the DNS and HTTP servers.


FreeBSD binaries
================

I plan for this to be the last release with binaries built on FreeBSD
10. I am going to upgrade the build machine.


Doco
====

All of the manuals are now DocBook XML, and the hodgepodge admixture of
manuals from three sources is gone. A stylesheet is supplied for
reading the manuals directly using a GUI WWW browser. They can also be
read using the |console-docbook-xml-viewer| tool from version 1.40 of
the nosh toolset.

The long-missing |tcp-environ| manual is now present.


HTTP servers
============

Hand in hand with the documentation improvement, |httpd| now has content
types for the |.xml| and |.xhtml| filename extensions.


DNS servers
===========

  *

    http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/djbwares/qmail-patches.html#any-to-cname

  *

    http://jdebp.info./Softwares/djbwares/qmail-patches.html#any-to-cname

The |ANY| query type in the DNS has never meant ALL, and has never
really been useful. Pretty much only one software even made use of
|ANY| for non-testing purposes. That was qmail, which I patched not to
do so back in 2003.

Although the diagnostic tools still support sending |ANY| queries, with
one exception, in this release all of the DNS server softwares now
synthesize non-responses, containing an invariant |HINFO| resource
record set, to |ANY| queries. The specialized content DNS servers
simply return such responses straightforwardly, as they do not have to
worry about |CNAME| chains, which they do not ever construct. The other
DNS servers have to handle |CNAME| chains.

The general-purpose |tinydns| and |axfrdns| content DNS servers will
continue to process |CNAME| chains as before, but will return a
synthesized |HINFO| resource record set at the end of the chain.
|dnscache| also processes |CNAME| chains as before, again returning the
chain with a synthesized |HINFO| resource record set at the end. It no
longer allows |ANY| queries as a loophole for retrieving cache contents,
and will not issue |ANY| queries from its back end.

The diagnostic tool that is the exception is |tinydns-get|, whose
operation is supposed to exactly replicate what |tinydns| does. It,
too, now synthesizes non-responses when an |ANY| lookup is requested.
Received on Wed Mar 20 2019 - 09:51:16 UTC

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