[dns-operations] The strange case of fox.com

[Dave Warren]

On 2016-03-04 07:05, Rich Goodson wrote:

> Also, who is to say that I can't have a misconfigured domain if I want to?

Probably your domain registration agreement would be an appropriate 
place for this language.

>> Sure, some tiny percentage of domains might pack it up and take up a 
>> new hobby, but for any business that wants people to pay their bills, 
>> buy their services, view their ads, or otherwise do the things that 
>> justify the expense of a having an internet presence, they'll hire 
>> someone competent and fix the issue.
> It appears that they hired someone competent who fixed it some 18 
> months later. 

Right, and for those 18 months that someone else had a misconfiguration, 
you and I hear from our customers, waste our customer service resources 
and technical resources dealing with someone else's misconfiguration. 
That's not acceptable. I want to cost-shift the fix back to the party 
that 1) has an incentive to make the site work, and 2) caused the 
problem in the first place.

By placing a very real cost on misconfigurations that is paid by whoever 
set up the misconfigured domain it will become more practical to 
configure things properly than to stick with a "werks fer me!" attitude 
leaving the rest of us to explain to customer after customer why someone 
else's domain doesn't really work.

> Plus, my job title at the time was not, "Person Assigned To Attempt To 
> Make Improvements To The Internet".  My job (or about 15% of my job) 
> was to make sure our customers could resolve DNS.  After multiple days 
> spent imitating Don Quixote on this issue already, my fake delegation 
> "fixed" the problem, at least for my customers.  I had no more time to 
> spend on the issue. 

This is true, except for the "no more time to spend on the issue" -- 
You'll spend more time on this issue tomorrow, and the day after, and 
the day after that, every time you run into yet another misconfigured 
domain. Also, your fake delegation will fail one day too, when the 
domain switches hosting providers and suddenly your fake delegation is 
wrong while the domain itself is finally correct for once.

And this is the whole point, you, me, and everyone else who runs a 
resolver shouldn't have to jump through hoops to make random domains 
work, or hear whining about how a website works properly on other 
networks but not ours when we're running standards compliant software. 
Rather than spending multiple days on such an issue, it would be quite 
convenient if registries or registrars did this automatically and 
notified their customers of problems, and if it goes unresolved, dropped 
the delegation.

-- 
Dave Warren
http://www.hireahit.com/
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren