North American Network Operators Group

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Re: dns authority changes and lame servers

  • From: Mike Lewinski
  • Date: Thu Oct 18 18:23:10 2007


Andrew Sullivan wrote:


I don't think this is a "flaw in the DNS system" as much as it is a
consequence of the funny economics currently on display among domain
name registrars, DNS operators, and ISPs.

I suppose it is a social problem at the very bottom here. If my users were educated enough to notify me when they moved authority I wouldn't have this problem. Maybe it's not fair to ask the Registrars/Roots to provide updates when it's really incumbent on their customers to do so.


But then I start to balk -- any process that involves duplicate updates of one piece of information in two disparate systems is inefficient at best, and inherently prone to these kind of errors even with good intentions.

There is an economic factor at play in our smaller scale operation. It's barely worth the time of billing to track all these "free" dns hostings. If we charged for it, the customers might be more attentive and notify us in order to be released from the charges (but likely we can't charge enough to really even make it worth their time either).

At one level this is all a minor nuisance. Then I hear of the customer who, doing business with another former customer in the same building, spent a year printing out and walking over their emails because they were too lazy to call us and find out why they weren't getting through. I can pretty fairly claim that's "not our fault" that no one bothered to ask us to remove the cruft, but the customers on the receiving end of the DNS black hole just know that our DNS server was "broken" and "didn't get an update" and next week they'll be calling me asking me to "update my cache" when they can't get to foobar.com.