INTERNIC Question

Thu May 28 02:55:00 UTC 1998

On Wed, May 27, 1998 at 10:46:02PM -0400, Al Reuben wrote:
> 
> I've got a quickie, and I am not sure where to ask it.
> 
> I am in the process of writing a domain-name registration tracking system,
> and I want to put some stuff in the Headers so that I can add our internal
> tracking numbers on it so that when we get a response, I can have a
> process look it over and decide what do do with it.
> 
> In specific, I put
> 
> X-NAC-DTS-Number: [a alex-generated number]
> 
> in the header, and it didn't get returned.
> 
> So, my questions are:
> 
> 1) Should the Internic be retaining this X Headers? 

I doubt they even parse the headers.  To retain them they'd have to parse
them and process in real-time.  I am reasonably certain that doesn't happen.

> 2) Why can't the Internet put interesting things in the header so that we
> could unifiy the way we look at them to automatically process them? Like:
> 
> X-Internic-Response: Registered
> 
> or
> 
> X-Internic-Response: Not-Registered-Already-taken
> 
> etc?
> 
> Comments welcome.

Actually, a "TAG" field in their template (guaranteed to be returned
unmolested), and a "Response" field (containing a restricted set of reply
codes) would do the job.

What I'd do is put the domain in the subject line, and then parse that on the
return.  That gives you the tuple you need  (domain, tracking number) which
then can be matched against subsequent messages concerning the same domain.

Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that the format of responses won't
change out from under you.

This is one of the problems with "human-readable" as opposed to
machine-defined systems.

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