[dns-operations] operational impact of empty MNAME and RNAME?

[Duane Wessels]

On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Joe Abley said:
>
> Has anybody tried hosting a prominent zone with these fields empty
> (e.g. specified as "." in a BIND9 zone file)? Was there any negative
> operational impact?

Not me, but I did recently run a survey of nameservers where I
collected SOA values.

Out of 1,582,521 zones that gave me SOA values:

   17,209 did not have a '.' in MNAME
    9,489 did not have a '.' in RNAME
   21,603 did not have two '.' in RNAME
    7,254 had MNAME equal to ''
    1,415 had RNAME equal to ''

Note, I'm not making any claims about the prominence of these
domains, or even that anyone cares about them at all.

Duane W.