Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. They aren't "invalid requests". You can put literally anything in a domain name (see RFC 2181, section 11) and the upstream should respond. I'm curious what resolvers are dropping these requests. The correct behavior is for dnsmasq to forward requests to the upstream regardless of the content of the QNAME. If dnsmasq doesn't get a response back in some reasonable amount of time, it should (probably) return SERVFA…
> AFAIK, dnsmasq supports DNSSEC, so the right answer is to turn on validation. Just disabled DNSSEC in my PiHole. Too many domains which are incorrectly configured leading to non-existing domain errors. And at least as far as I could find, PiHole has no way to selectively disable DNSSEC validation for certain domains.
That's an interesting and somewhat surprising data point given the use of DNSSEC validation at public resolvers (e.g., 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, etc.). Might be something that would be useful to track by those following DNSSEC deployment.
For selectively disabling DNSSEC validation, I gather PiHole+dnsmasq doesn't support Reverse Trust Anchors (RTA). Unfortunate.