Re: broken DNS lookups by many web browsers?

>Is this actually incorrect behavior by the clients?  If caching IPs is too
>big a win for clients to give up, can we at least make them sensitive to
>ttls?  Or at the very least do what libwww4 does and query again on failure?
>
>Jeff Lewis

We have a similar problem with our proxy cache [1].

For a long time we have been trying to encourage browser authors to
ensure that a browser will try multiple A records if a DNS lookup
returns multiple A records.

For example, a lookup on wwwcache.hensa.ac.uk returns seven A records.
These are round-robin'ed, but if the one that a browser happens to be
using goes down, the browser won't try the others, even though it has
the addresses. (The Linemode browser is a notable exception :-)

Telnet and ftp have been doing this for a long time. What makes Web
browsers/authors so different.

Neil Smith
HENSA Unix
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[1] http://www.hensa.ac.uk/wwwcache/

Received on Friday, 8 March 1996 05:05:25 UTC