Detecting parked domains

Thu Aug 3 13:05:36 UTC 2006

On 3-Aug-2006, at 04:05, Duane Wessels wrote:

>> I am looking for a way that you, or anyone else, could indicate a  
>> domain
>> should not be considered "in service" although the name is  
>> registered and
>> has an A record pointing to an active server so when I check that  
>> name
>> it doesn't require a human to interpret the results.
>
> You might be able to use lack of an SOA record as a hint.  In my
> experience, parked domains often do not have SOA records because
> the parking companies are lazy.  It is a lot easier to put all the
> parked domains in a parent zone file, or even use a wildcard, rather
> than have a zone file for each parked name.

Surely for that to work for most of the domains we're talking about,  
the parking companies would need to be able to insert arbitrary  
records into zones such as "ORG", "NET" and "COM", which isn't  
something that any of the registries for those zones permit.

Do you have an example of a parked domain with no SOA record?

Joe