[dns-operations] Delegation checking (was: Re: Some DNSSEC trivia)

[Patrik Wallstrom]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Jo Rhett wrote:

>>>> People keep saying this, but the registration agreement as far back
>>>> at 1993 (earliest I have) says that it's the registrant's
>>>> responsibility to keep their contact information up to date.
>>>
>>> That doesn't matter.  Registries aren't allowed to contact the
>>> registrants directly.  They have to go through the registrars.  This
>>> isn't that surprising: retailers don't like retail customers to be
>>> talking to wholesalers generally.  So if the registry performs an
>>> action on a domain, and it causes the domain to go dark, there is the
>>> potential of the registrant quite correctly complaining that s/he
>>> wasn't informed of the action by the registry.
>>
>> But how do you tell the difference between a registrant and a
>> nameserver operator just handling the DNS for a registrant? You can't.
>>
>> So, could a registry contact SOA rname?
>
> Irrelevant.  It's the registrant's job to make sure the contact  
> information is correct.  If they don't list a party they trust to solve 
> DNS problems, then they suffer.

I don't agree with that at all. Well, the registrant suffer from bad
DNS, that is true, but the registrant doesn't really care as long as
their web and e-mail works. Acting as a registry you should really
care about a good working DNS structure, which actually means you
should communicate something to people using DNS. If .SE wants to
raise the DNS quality from 20% to 10% poorly configured domains, we
would really want to tell the nameserver operators that they're doing
a poor job (or at least that they should improve the quality of their
service).

So what we soon are doing is actually sending e-mails to nameserver
operators (based on SOA rname). And that does in my opinion not mean
that .SE are talking directly to its registrants. I don't remember the
number of operators right now, but they are far less than the number
of registrants by the factor of 100 or more.

(Building on top of the retailers argument above, this is not much
different from Volvo contacting Volvo owners about their faulty cars
and recalling them for service.)

-- 
patrik_wallstrom->foodfight->pawal at blipp.com->+46-733173956