dns authority changes and lame servers

Thu Oct 18 18:27:35 UTC 2007

I find it exceptionally annoying that there is no process whereby the 
root servers and/or registrars can inform us of new/modified/removed 
delegations. The end result is that we serve a lot of stale zones long 
after they leave us. In the past I've hacked out some perl to audit our 
BIND configs and find the stuff that's moved, but it's ugly. And really, 
it's only partially dependable. For example, does the lack of root 
server records mean that:

1) the customer abandoned the zone and no longer wishes us to host it
- or -
2) the customer forgot to pay the zone today, and tomorrow will bitch 
like hell if my script removes it overnight

There are sub-problems of this, mostly related around customers who move 
and change their company names every six months. So now I have a 
customer whose zone has expired from the roots (no more email to them) 
and whose phone number has changed (no way to call and find out what 
real intentions re: expired zone are). It's not worth our time to 
physically drive to their site to answer a question that has little to 
no real financial implications for us (thanks to the free hosting of up 
to three domains with order of T1 service).

So questions:

1) Does anyone else find this flaw in the DNS system as annoying as I 
do? If authority is to be regularly moved around between ISPs (who may 
be hosting thousands of customer domains), some automated process is 
needed to allow the ISP to make intelligent choices about when to remove 
a customer zone (authority transfers to another provider are likely the 
thing I'd key on, while non-payment removals would probably have a 30 
day grace period since aforementioned physical moves are most likely 
cause of non-payment expiration).

2) Does anyone have a better way of cleaning out the dreck than some 
home-grown scripts? I've used sleep() judiciously to try not beating on 
any external servers more than necessary, but the output is less than 
100% predictable and often hand audits are required before I can really 
generate automatic removals.

We used to get bitch notices from someone about zones we were supposed 
to be authoritative for and weren't. This was even more annoying, since 
often the whole point was that the customer was "parking" it on our 
servers but had used their 3 freebies and had no real immediate use for 
it, so neglected to tell us of it. Fine. But give us some notification, 
from somebody, so we can stick an empty placeholder in there and be 
ready when it is deployed.

For extra fun, this week a customer simply added their new providers DNS 
servers to their zone, without removing ours, or asking us to remove our 
config. So things were kinda whacky for them until someone called us and 
asked WTF was going on.