[mad idea] Provide a SRV-resolution test hostname
Submitted by Simon McVittie
Assigned to Telepathy bugs list
Description
As a service to the Internet in general, and Telepathy users in particular, we could try to arrange with the fd.o admins to have the following:
srvtest.telepathy.freedesktop.org (an A record) _xmpp-client._tcp.srvtest.freedesktop.org (an SRV record)
They don't need to point to anything in particular (we could have them both resolve to 127.0.0.1 or something), as long as they are resolvable.
Given that, we could have an easy diagnostic in connection managers and/or UIs for "SRV records are broken on your network, please fix it or specify the server name manually", shown when:
- a connection cannot connect, and
- srvtest.telepathy.freedesktop.org A resolves successfully, and
- _xmpp-client._tcp.srvtest.telepathy.freedesktop.org SRV does not resolve
For instance, dnsmasq >= 1.5 has a misleadingly-named option ("filterwin2k") that deliberately breaks SRV to avoid dial-on-demand, and in versions < 2.12 it's even on by default. Unfortunately, several embedded Linux distributions for routers use dnsmasq versions between 1.5 and 2.12...