DNS Query Structure

When I am sending a DNS query to the DNS it returns the header with the format bit set. Indicating there is a problem with the format, but I am failing to see what it is. Its possible I have misinterpreted the RFC, or misread it but right now I cant seem to work it out.

The DNS structure I am sending looks like this in hex.

Header

00 01   - ID = 1
01 00   - RD = 1
00 01   - QD = 1
00 00   - AN
00 00   - NS
00 00   - NR


   Question  for www.google.com

   03 77   - 3 w
   77 77   - w w
   06 67   - 6 g
   6f 6f   - o o
   67 6c   - g l
   65 03   - e 3
   63 6f   - c o
   6d 00   - m 0
   00 01   - QTYPE
   00 01   - QCLASS

I then flip the bytes for any field that is two bytes, to convert to big endian for the network format. So eac开发者_StackOverflowh row of the header, and then QTYPE and QCLASS ...

Here's what a byte-by-byte hexdump of that query packet should look like (tested and working!):

00000000  00 01 01 00 00 01 00 00  00 00 00 00 03 77 77 77  |.............www|
00000010  06 67 6f 6f 67 6c 65 03  63 6f 6d 00 00 01 00 01  |.google.com.....|

I think your problem is that the third and fourth bytes of the packet (flags and rcode) are two single-byte fields, not one 2-byte field - it looks like you might be treating it as a 16 bit integer and swapping the bytes?

To get these you can use netcat and dig.

# nc –uip 53 > dnsreqdump
# dig www.example.com @localhost
# nc –u 8.8.8.8 53 <dnsreqdump >dnsrespdump

Now you can inspect them in hexedit or your favorite hex editor.

I tend to think that your problem depends on how are you actually "flipping the bits to convert to network format".

Typical C library implementations provide the htonl() function family to do the conversion from host into network order and viceversa.

Of course, without seeing the code, I cannot be sure that this is the problem.