DNS Lib Underscore Bug Bites Everyone's Favorite Init Tool, Blanks Netflix (theregister.co.uk)

Reader OneHundredAndTen writes and shares a report: Systemd doing what it does best. From a report on The Register: A few Penguinistas spent a weekend working out why they can't get through to Netflix from their Linux machines, because when they tried, their DNS lookups failed. The issue emerged over the weekend, when Gentoo user Dennis Schridde submitted a bug report to the Systemd project. Essentially, he described a failure within systemd-resolve, a Systemd component that turns human-readable domain names into IP addresses for software, like web browsers, to connect to. The Systemd resolver couldn't look up Netflix's servers for Schridde's web browser, according to the report. In his detailed post, Schridde said he expected this to happen: ipv6_1-cxl0-c088.1.lhr004.ix.nflxvideo.net gets resolved to 37.77.187.142 or 2a00:86c0:5:5::142. When in reality, that wasn't happening, so Netflix couldn't be reached on his box. His speculation that libidn2, which adds internationalised domain names support to the resolver, was at fault turned out to be accurate. Rebuilding Systemd without that library cleared the problem.

Comments

Re:The problem is systemd breaking unexpectedly

[ncc74656]

Exactly how is this insightful? The parent is going on a rant about systemd when it was libidn2 that had the bug.

If systemd hadn't taken it upon itself to handle DNS resolution instead of sticking to its ostensibly primary job (initd), it would never have had reason to pull in libidn2 and fall to one of its bugs.

The Unix Way. systemd fails it.