[net-dns-users] Fwd: Re: With 1.05 on OS X I'm not seeing errorstring on queries

[Doug Barton]

On 04/12/2016 05:32 PM, Dick Franks wrote:
> axfr()
>
> Since 0.43 there has been no attempt to provide anything in errorstring.

My experience (which goes back well over a decade) is at odds with your 
assertion. For successful AXFRs it's filled with "unknown error or no 
error" and as far as I can tell by going back in RCS to at least 2004, 
it always has been.

> The motivation for doing something different now was to provide some
> means of finding out what went wrong with TSIG verifications which is
> not easy to uncover without it.

That seems reasonable.

>  I see no justification for filling
> errorstring when there is no useful information to impart.

Consistency with previous versions of the module is all the 
justification you need.

> Adding
> RCODE: NOERROR provides no useful information because the transfer gets
> aborted if anything else shows up in a packet header (per RFC1035, 6.3).

First, I'm not sure that's always been true, which is why I added the 
test I have for AXFR in the first place. Second, while it may be true 
that the transfer aborts in those circumstances now, using the RCODE to 
indicate that it was successful (as has already been done essentially 
since day 1) is good future-proofing.

> send()
>
> The proper place to test the outcome of the transaction is using
> $result->header->rcode() which is a recognised feature of DNS protocol.

As I mentioned previously, that only works for the send method. It does 
not work for search or query.

> I note that errorstring has always been set (redundantly) the same as
> rcode.  Perhaps we need to accept that as one of Net::DNS's historical
> quirks, which probably arose from design indecision in its very early
> history.  It is certainly present in 0.12, where hardly anything else
> works exactly as it does now.

Maintaining consistency with previous code is its own value, and an 
incredibly important one. Making sure that RCODE remains available to 
the search and query methods is valuable as well.

> As with axfr(), TSIG errors get funnelled into errorstring, so there is
> no longer any guarantee that it will be one of the usual RCODE
> mnemonics.  Other than that, I am minded to restore the old behaviour.

Yay! That's a good start. :)

Doug