Broken domain statistics...

Fri Feb 13 06:55:04 UTC 1998

Phillip Vandry <vandry at Mlink.NET> writes:

> How do you find them all? You could check your DNS logs for lame
> delegations and collect a list, but that's not all that great.

NSI used to make the root zone files freely available via FTP; they are
still up for FTP, but not without restriction. You can apply to NSI to
get a login and password to FTP into the restricted zone host; if you
have a decent justification for why you need the data, you can obtain
one without much trouble.

Once you have the root zone files, you can list all of the domains
registered on your nameservers; I have a small set of perl scripts
that massage the data into a more usable format. I've been meaning
to tar them up and make them available for a while now. Or roll
your own, it's not particularly difficult.

[ ... ]
> While they're at it, I should be able to NAK a registration or domain
> modification so that it is cancelled if I don't want it on my nameservers.

According to the original Guardian paper, setting the BEFORE-USE
attribute on a host record would require the nameserver admin to ACK
every domain registration before their nameserver could be listed for
that domain. However, the BEFORE-USE attribute has never been implemented
for contacts or host records.

When the issue was raised on guard-talk at internic long long ago, an NSI rep
explained that BEFORE-USE was never implemented because ``there was no
consensus from the community that we should implement BEFORE-USE'', and
because they were ``afraid that people would erroneously set BEFORE-USE
on their nameservers or contacts and be deluged with mail requesting
ACKs on new domain registrations, and new domain registrations would
get slowed down, and the queues would back up forever'' (paraphrased).

I may actually still have that thread in an old guard-talk mailbox,
I should dig it up.

-- 
Michael Handler <handler at sub-rosa.com>             you might surprise yourself