Unable to discover cluster nodes with an empty rack name

[rgooding]

Please answer these questions before submitting your issue. Thanks!

What version of Cassandra are you using?

3.11.8, 4.0.3

What version of Gocql are you using?

1.5.2

What version of Go are you using?

1.20.3

We have a client who is using gocql to connect to a Cassandra cluster which has been configured with an empty rack name on all nodes. What we are seeing is that gocql is unable to discover the cluster topology and it only sends requests to the initial contact point(s).
When using the Java driver against this cluster it works just fine and discovers all of the nodes correctly. The difference appears to be that they filter out nodes that have a NULL rack name in system.peers[_v2] and gocql filters out nodes with an empty string in the rack name.

I have been able to reproduce this in a lab environment on Cassandra 3.11 and 4.0 by using GossipingPropertyFileSnitch and setting the rack to an empty string in cassandra-rackdc.properties.