[dns-operations] _nicname._tcp

[Jay Daley]

On 26/07/2010, at 9:22 PM, Jim Reid wrote:

> On 26 Jul 2010, at 00:38, Jay Daley wrote:
> 
>> And may I take opportunity to remind people of "_nicname._tcp SRV" to locate WHOIS servers.
> 
> Why? There are plenty of other ad-hoc ways of locating whois servers already. Adding another seems pointless. Most registries provide a link to their whois service on their home page. IANA publish the names of the whois servers for those TLDs who provide this service. Then there are generic whois lookup services like uwhois.com.

Because this mechanism gets the location data direct from the horse's mouth.
 
> A standardised naming convention for locating whois servers would be of marginal use at best. [And why only whois servers? Why not provide SRV records for the TLD's DNS,

DNS? Eh?

> web

If anyone wants to then they can with an A record.

> and EPP servers too?]

because there is no public access to EPP servers so no need for a public advert.

> Besides, as everyone knows, criminals *always* put their contact details in whois because ICANN makes them.

Irrelevant.

> The long-dead draft-sanz-whois-srv-01.txt didn't get very far the last time it was discussed. So what's changed to make it more likely to gain acceptance now?

You may not have noticed but it has pretty good community acceptance already.  Try a few of your favourite TLDs to see.

> IIRC there were two problems with this idea. The first was it didn't work for thin registries where registrars run the whois servers that hold registrant data, not the registry.  The second was/is it is clumsy when there are sub-registries under the TLD. You had to walk up the tree, pre-pending _nicname._tcp to the QNAME until you hit the "closest encloser" registry for the domain name.

Even thin registries have WHOIS servers, the only difference is the data within it, which is a WHOIS protocol issue not a location issue.

> Oh and I would have expected _nicname._udp to be a wiser choice for an SRV record since most whois queries use UDP.

No they don't.  It's all TCP.

> This discussion probably needs to move from this list as the thread's not about DNS operations....


This discussion is all about operational use of DNS records.

cheers
Jay

-- 
Jay Daley
Chief Executive
.nz Registry Services (New Zealand Domain Name Registry Limited)
desk: +64 4 931 6977
mobile: +64 21 678840