> On Oct 28, 2016, at 4:02 PM, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.nordd...@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> Hello
> 
> Many service providers have IPv4 reverse DNS for all their IP addresses. If 
> nothing is more relevant, this will often just be the IPv4 address hashed 
> somehow and tagged to the ISP domain name. For some arcane reason it is 
> important to have the forward DNS match the reverse DNS or some mail servers 
> might reject your mails.
> 
> However with IPv6 it is not practical to build such a complete reverse DNS 
> zone. You could do a star entry but that would fail the reverse/forward match 
> test.
> 
> It should be simple to build a DNS server that will automatically generate a 
> hostname value for every reverse lookup received, and also be able to parse 
> that hostname value to return the correct IPv6 address on forward lookups.
> 
> Does any DNS server have that feature?

It's easy enough to implement with plugins on some servers.

> Should we have it?

Meh.

> Why not?

Because having an automatically generated reverse DNS is a sign that the IP 
address is not really intended to be offering public services, rather it's a 
malware-infested end user machine.

> 
> I know of some arguments for:
> 
> 1a) mail servers like it

... because it's a sign that the mail is coming from a real mailserver 
configured by a competent admin, rather than being a random compromised 
machine. That's not the case if you're just synthesizing reverse DNS for 
arbitrary IP addresses on your network.

> 
> 1b) anti spam filters believe in the magic of checking forward/reverse match.

For the same reason as above. Spam filters are also often smart enough to 
recognize, and treat as dubious, synthesized reverse DNS.

If you have synthesized reverse DNS on your smarthost you're likely to have a 
bad time, perhaps initially, perhaps the first time someone notices bad mail 
coming from it and doesn't recognize it as a legitimate smarthost.

> 
> 2) traceroute will be nicer

Most of those hosts a traceroute goes through should hopefully have stable IP 
addresses and meaningful, not synthesized, reverse DNS, I'd think. Consumer 
endpoints are the only ones where you might expect that not to be the case and 
synthesized reverse DNS might be an improvement there.

> 
> 3) http://ipv6-test.com/ will give me 20/20 instead of 19/20 (yes that was 
> what got me going on this post)
> 
> 4) Output from "who" command on Unix will look nicer (maybe).
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Baldur

Cheers,
  Steve


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