DNS LOC Record (2014)

12 days ago

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CloudFlare developed RRDNS, a fast and resilient authoritative DNS server written in Go.
DNS is complex due to its age (RFC 1035 from 1987) and evolving standards.
LOC records, a rarely used DNS record type, specify physical locations.
CloudFlare had 743 LOC records in its database, with one customer reporting an issue.
The issue was due to missing code in RRDNS to parse LOC records from text to binary format.
RFC 1876 (1996) defines the textual and binary formats for LOC records.
The textual format includes latitude, longitude, altitude, and optional size/precision values.
The binary format encodes these values into fixed-size fields with special encoding for size/precision.
A parser was written to fix the issue, and all LOC records are now served correctly.
An example LOC record query for geekatlas.com is provided.

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