This afternoon I reckon I was six deep in a stack of yaks that I needed to shave to finish this job, and four of them turned up today. I feel like everything I try to do reveals some undiscovered problem that needs fixing…

• When the network is a bit broken, my DNS servers soon stop being able to provide answers, because the most popular sites insist on tiny TTLs so they can move fast and break things.

  As a result the DNS gets the blame for network problems, and helpdesk issues get misdirected, and confusion reigns.

• Serve-Stale to the rescue! It was implemented towards the end of last year in BIND and is a feature of the 9.12 releases.

  • Let’s deploy it! First attempt in March with 9.12.1.

  • CVE-2018-5737 appears!

    Roll back!

  • The logging is too noisy for production so we need to wait for 9.12.2 which includes a separate logging category for serve-stale.

  • Time passes…

  • Deploy 9.12.2 earlier this week, more carefully.

  • Let’s make sure everything is sorted before we turn on serve-stale again! (Now we get to today.)

    • The logging settings need revising: serve-stale is enough of a shove to make it worth reviewing other noisy log categories.

    • Can we leave most of them off most of the time, and use the default-debug category to let us turn them on when necessary?

    • This means the debug 1 level needs to be not completely appalling. Let’s try it!

      • Hmm, this RPZ debug log looks a bit broken. Let’s fix it!

      • Two little patches, one cosmetic, one a possible minor bug fix.

        • Need to rebase my hack branch onto master to test the patches.

        • Fix dratted merge conflicts.

      • Build patched server!

        • Build fails :-( why?

        • No enlightenment from commit logs.

        • Sigh, let’s git bisect the build system to work out which commit broke things…

          • While the workstation churns away repeatedly building BIND, let’s get coffee!

        • Success! The culprit is found!

        • Submit bug report

        • Work around bug, and get a successful build!

      • Test patched server!

        • The little patches seem OK, but while repeatedly restarting the server, a more worrying bug turns up!

          Sometimes when the server starts, my monitoring queries get stuck with SERVFAIL responses when they should succeed! Why?

        • Really don’t want this to be anything that might affect production, so it needs investigation.

        • Turn off noisy background activity, and reproduce the problem with a simpler query stream. It’s still hard to characterize the bug.

          • I’ll need to test this in a less weird and more easily reconfigured server than my toy server. Let’s spin up a VM.

            • Damnit, my virtualbox setup was broken by the jessie -> stretch upgrade!

            • Work out that this is because virtualbox is no longer included in stretch and the remnants from jessie are not compatible with the stretch kernel.

            • Reinstall virtualbox direct from Oracle. It now works again.

          • Install BIND on the new VM with a simplified version of my toy config. Reproduce the bug.

        • Is it related to serve-stale? no. QNAME minimization? no. RPZ? no.

        • After much headscratching and experimentation, enlightenment slowly, painfully dawns.

        • Submit bug report

          Actually, the writing of the bug report, and especially the testing of the unfounded assertions and guesses as I wrote it, was a key part of pinning down this weirdness.

          I think this is one of the most obscure DNS interoperability problems I have investigated!

OK, that’s it for now. I still have two patches to submit, and a revised logging configuration to finalize, so I can put serve-stale into production, so I can make it easier in some situations for my colleagues to tell the difference between a network problem and a DNS problem.