Curious Cloudflare DNS behavior

Sun May 31 16:31:26 UTC 2020

On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 10:07:41AM -0600, Keith Medcalf wrote:
> On Saturday, 30 May, 2020 13:18, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:
> 
> >The Internet didn't evolve in the way its designers expected.  Early
> >mistakes and errors required terrible remediation.  As an example, look
> >at the difficulty involved in running a service like e-mail or DNS.
> >E-mail requires all sorts of things to interoperate well, including
> SPF,
> >DKIM, SSL, DNSBL's, etc., etc., and it is a complicated service to run
> >self-hosted.  DNS is only somewhat better, with the complexity of
> DNSSEC
> >and other recent developments making for more difficulties in
> maintaining
> >self-hosted services.
> 
> I've been running my own DNS and e-mail for more than a quarter century.
> Contrary to your proposition it hasn't gotten much more complicated over
> than time.

Really?  Because nowadays, there's all this extra crap that didn't used
to exist. 

>From my perspective, it's gone from "configure Sendmail on your Sun
workstation and compile Elm (back in the '80's)" to something a lot more
complicated.

Now you need to sign your mail with DKIM, have SPF records, and even if
you cross all the T's and dot all the I's, you can expect your mail to be
rejected at some major mail sites because the LACK of a consistent high
volume of mail being sent by your site is actually scored against you. 
On the inbound side, you now need to be filtering your mail with 
Spamassassin and DNSBL's, and also virus scanners because it's likely
some of your users won't be.  You need to support both IMAP _and_ webmail
if you want to be able to support users, because we are now in that
"post-PC" era where people expect to be able to sit down at an arbitrary
PC and have an experience on par with that of any of the mail service
providers.

I've watched in dismay as many technically competent sysadmins, and even
whole service providers, have given up and outsourced e-mail, because
it is so difficult to do well.  Even Apple finally ditched their
OSX Server product's email services, which had for years been one of
my best examples of "it's still possible to run this yourself."

If this is your idea of "hasn't gotten much more complicated", I salute
your technical prowess.  It's not that I want this to be the status quo,
but I'm also not so blind as to deny what is going on.  :-(

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way
through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that
democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"-Asimov