DNS Out Of Protocol Signalling

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."¶

This Internet-Draft will expire on 14 September 2023.¶

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2023 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Operators of name servers can benefit from automatically taking action upon certain conditions in the name server software. Some conditions can be monitored from outside the name server software, but for adequate and immediate action, the name server software can signal itself about the condition immediately when it occurs to invoke action by a listener for these signals.¶

An example of such a condition is when all zones, from a set served from an anycasted prefix, are loaded and ready to be served, with the associated automatic actions to only announce a prefix route from the point-of-presence where the name server is running, if all zones from the set are ready to be served, and to withdraw the prefix route if one of the zones cannot be served. This way queries for zones will only reach the point-of-presence if the name server software can answer those queries.¶

Operators of anycasted DNS authoritative services with diverse implementations will benefit from standardizing of the name server signalling, but before coming to a specification for the mechanism, this document will serve to inventorise the already available standardized and non-standardized signalling channels and assess them for usability for out of protocol signalling.¶

2. Terminology and Definitions

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119][RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶

3. Conditions to be signalled

This section served to collect a list of conditions for which actions outside of the DNS protocol may be interesting. It is by no means meant to be a complete list, but serves to inventorise the requirements for the signalling channel.¶

4. Requirements for signalling mechanisms and channels

The following requirements can be distilled from Section 3.¶

5. Existing signalling mechanisms and channels

What follows is a list of existing signalling mechanisms assessed on their suitability based on the requirements outlined in the previous paragraph.¶

6. Security and Privacy Considerations

Signalling MUST be performed in an authenticated and private manner.¶

7. Implementation Status

• Knot DNS has support for D-Bus notifications (See Section 5.3) for significant server and zone events with the "dbus-event" configuration parameter since version 3.1.6 [Knot-DNS-3.1.6]¶

8. IANA Considerations

This document has no IANA actions¶

9. Acknowledgements

Appendix A. Implementation Status

Note to the RFC Editor: please remove this entire appendix before publication.¶

Knot currently uses [D-Bus] for this.¶

Appendix B. Change History

Note to the RFC Editor: please remove this entire appendix before publication.¶

• draft-grubto-dnsop-dns-out-of-protocol-signalling-00¶

Initial version¶

Authors' Addresses