Problems with DNS and A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET

[Kevin Darcy]

cmadams at HiWAAY.net wrote:

> Once upon a time, Cricket Liu <cricket at VeriSign.com> said:
> >There could be another domain name *under* traster.com in the
> >com zone, such as a glue address record for ns1.traster.com.  So
> >the traster.com node would exist, but would have no RRs associated
> >with it.
>
> There is: dns.traster.com is 208.34.164.50.
>
> This brings a question to mind.  If I registered somedomain.com and set
> my name servers to be "www.somedomain.com", "somdomain.com", and
> "mail.somedomain.com", why would I ever need to pay for my domain?  I
> could get someone else to use my servers for DNS to insure that my glue
> records remain.  I wouldn't have any MX records, but AFAIK most mail
> server software will fall back to A records.

Hmmm... Offhand, I think it would probably work for a while, although it
would be rude to the TLD servers and it would introduce delays for mail
delivery (MX failover to A). But the problem is, if anyone
*else* registered "somedomain.com" legitimately, they'd be able to hijack
your traffic ("all your email belong to us" -- sorry, couldn't resist :-)

NSI used to have an option to "reserve" a domain name, which didn't
require any nameservers and just locked in the domain name. That would
have prevented the situation described above. But I just checked their
website, and NSI appears to no longer offer that service. Probably it
wasn't very marketable because they were charging *more* for a reservation
than for a registration -- presumably on the assumption that end-users
would be _reserving_ domain names directly, whereas they would generally
be _registering_ domain names through middlemen like ISPs or hosting
companies, and thus paying marked-up rates -- and now that NSI is trying
harder to compete with other registrars and offering free, limited
DNS hosting (I assume that's what is included with the free "under
construction" web page), the reservation option makes zero sense...


- Kevin