alt Hacker NewsIt's remarkable that the ordinary DNS lookup function in glibc doesn't work if the records aren't in the right order. It's amazing to me we went 20+ years without that causing more problems. My guess is most people publishing DNS records just sort of knew that the order mattered in practice, maybe figuring it out in early testing.
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silverwind • yesterday at 7:01 PM
It's more likely because the internet runs on a very small number of authorative server implementations which all implement this ordering quirk.
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I think it's more of a server side ordering, in which there were not that many DNS servers out there, and the ones that didn't keep it in order quickly changed the behavior because of interop.
CNAMES are a huge pain in the ass (as noted by DJB https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/notes.html)