dns authority changes and lame servers

Thu Oct 18 22:19:24 UTC 2007

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> I don't think this is a "flaw in the DNS system" as much as it is a
> consequence of the funny economics currently on display among domain
> name registrars, DNS operators, and ISPs.

I suppose it is a social problem at the very bottom here. If my users 
were educated enough to notify me when they moved authority I wouldn't 
have this problem. Maybe it's not fair to ask the Registrars/Roots to 
provide updates when it's really incumbent on their customers to do so.

But then I start to balk -- any process that involves duplicate updates 
of one piece of information in two disparate systems is inefficient at 
best, and inherently prone to these kind of errors even with good 
intentions.

There is an economic factor at play in our smaller scale operation. It's 
barely worth the time of billing to track all these "free" dns hostings. 
If we charged for it, the customers might be more attentive and notify 
us in order to be released from the charges (but likely we can't charge 
enough to really even make it worth their time either).

At one level this is all a minor nuisance. Then I hear of the customer 
who, doing business with another former customer in the same building, 
spent a year printing out and walking over their emails because they 
were too lazy to call us and find out why they weren't getting through. 
I can pretty fairly claim that's "not our fault" that no one bothered to 
ask us to remove the cruft, but the customers on the receiving end of 
the DNS black hole just know that our DNS server was "broken" and 
"didn't get an update" and next week they'll be calling me asking me to 
"update my cache" when they can't get to foobar.com.