dns authority changes and lame servers

Thu Oct 18 19:12:50 UTC 2007

> 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

As an operator of both free and paid DNS services, I wish there was a
quick and easy way to pull a list of all of the zones that were
delegated to a specific IP address.  I say IP because people can now
register their own DNS name servers at the registrar and use our IP
addresses, so using the "official" hostname isn't even fool-proof.
Being able to pull such an "official" list for forward DNS zones would
certainly make life easier.

We also have home-grown scripts that figure out whether a domain is
delegated to us or not and flag the ones that aren't.  In the case of
the free service we flag them for two weeks and if they still aren't
delegated to us after that period we disable them on the DNS servers but
leave the domain in their account.  In the case of the paid service we
make a note of the status in the database but do not make any changes to
the account (they're paying us, after all, to have it there).  We don't
do recursive lookups so it's not an issue (even though it's technically
an RFC violation, if I remember correctly).

I suppose the problem with having an official list to query would be
getting all of the various registries to participate and keep it
regularly updated.  I personally qualify this as a slight inconvenience,
but I'm not sure I would call it a flaw in the DNS system.

-Justin Scott