What are they smoking?

Mon Sep 15 21:14:36 UTC 2003

On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Mark Vallar wrote:
> > This is sufficiently technically and business slimy that

I agree completely. Verisign marketing practices are getting worse by the 
day with introduction of redeption period, fees for non-working international
domains, prevention of domain transferes, emails to all their customers 
(including isp affiliates) advertising their webhosting services, etc.

> > I would null-route that IP, personally.
>
> The bigger issue is DNS troubleshooting.....what a nightmare when a query of
> the *.gtld-servers.net servers does not return an error.  What happens when
> they change the IP because of null-route'ing of the current IP to a
> completely different /8 subnet.

You can potentionally check on what ip(s) are currently set by querying for
*.com and *.net (yes "*" is valid name for dns query that should provide 
info on what is set for as * in zone file). One way to deal with it
automnaticly is to have dns server at the time when it started, check the 
tld zone files that it cashes for '*' and if option is specified, then 
dns server can return nxdomain for those top-level domains where '*' is 
present. ISC and other software dns vendors should consider writing thise 
option for next release and ISP should then implement it. 

Another way to fight this new scheme is to complain to ICANN and to US
Department of Commerce regarding Verisign semi-illegal marketing 
practices. You might mention that if this continies root tlds may soon 
return 'A' record for non-existant top level domains (www.verisign.die 
for example :), after all half the root dns servers are controlled by 
verisign as well...

> Who engineered this!!!! 
You can thank the ruthless capitalistic approach of the current Verisign 
board of directors and their attempts to extract money in every possible
way related to .com/.net domains at the registry (verisign-grs) level because 
they are loosing so many domain at the registry level to their competitors.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net

What *are* they smoking?

What are they smoking?