app: catch a search domain that swallows DNS queries

A tablet on a healthy network could not resolve anything. The DNS server
answered the bare name correctly — NOERROR, two records, A and AAAA, with
and without EDNS0 — so the earlier finding blamed the device's resolver.
It was wrong. The network advertised hudelist.local as a search domain and
the server silently dropped every query under it: not NXDOMAIN, nothing at
all. Resolvers append search domains, so they waited for a reply that was
never coming.

Silence is the part that makes this vicious. A negative answer moves a
resolver on; no answer looks like packet loss, so it retries, and some
give up on the lookup entirely. It also explains how two devices on one
network can disagree about whether DNS works — the phone tried the plain
name first and never noticed.

The probe now asks about a nonce name under each advertised search domain,
where the wanted answer is NXDOMAIN and only silence is a fault. The
finding is ordered ahead of dns.system_resolver_broken so the two cannot
both fire: without that, this exact network gets told its device is
broken.

Severity follows the harm rather than the shape. HIGH when resolution is
actually failing, MEDIUM when the domain is a black hole but this resolver
happens to try the plain name first — calling that HIGH would be crying
wolf on a network that works. The message names the fix and notes that
.local is reserved for mDNS by RFC 6762 and widely dropped by design,
while home.arpa (RFC 8375) is the name reserved for this.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
mrambossek
2026-08-02 10:29:04 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent cfa58e8d60
commit a17c3fd9e6
4 changed files with 96 additions and 2 deletions
+1
View File
@@ -89,6 +89,7 @@ rolled up under *connectivity* instead — the third occurrence of rule 1 being
| code | severity | means | rules out |
|---|---|---|---|
| `dns.search_domain_unanswered` | high | The network advertises a DNS search domain that its own server does not answer for. | A fault on this device: the same server answers ordinary names normally. |
| `dns.system_resolver_broken` | high | The network's DNS server answers, but this device cannot resolve names through it. | A network fault: the server replied to a query sent from this device. |
| `measurement.vpn_constrained` | info | A VPN was active, so the networks underneath it could not be measured. | Nothing — this run says little about the underlying network either way. |
| `v6.no_default_route` | medium | The device has a global IPv6 address but no IPv6 default route. | Guesswork: this is read from the routing table, not inferred from silence. |