[dns-operations] I missed the announcement: .ARPA has beendeleted

[Crist Clark]

>>> On 2/16/2010 at 1:38 PM, Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
> * Stephane Bortzmeyer:
> 
>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 10:17:51PM +0100,
>>  Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> wrote 
>>  a message of 17 lines which said:
>>
>>> The roots receive the full QNAME.  If the QNAME contains multiple
>>> lables, a Name Error response could still happen if the TLD existed,
>>> so TLD non-existence cannot be inferred in many cases.
>>
>> You did not read Crist Clark's message. He is certainly aware of
>> that. He suggests to use the _SOA_ record in the _AUTHORITY_ section
>> to find out if the TLD exists or not (and it seems to work).
> 
> The SOA record does not contain the longest existing suffix.  I think
> you really need to know that the root is delegation-centric, or that
> all delegations have a single label, combined with the SOA trick to
> deal with the arpa. special cases.

Shouldn't it always contain the longest valid zone? I mean, that's
what it's there for right?

I mean sure, you could get a NXDOMAIN for "way.out.here.example.tld"
with an SOA for "example.tld" even if they have "it.is.here" as a
valid name in the "example.tld" zone, but the discussion was
specifically about the existence/non-existence of TLDs.

So my point was, is there any way to get back an SOA for "." in
an NXDOMAIN response if the TLD of the QNAME exists? (I'm really
asking, I hadn't really thought about it until I read vixie's
message.)