Orphaned CNAME Records

[Martin McCormick]

	I posted a message a couple of days ago about trying to get
rid of CNAME records that are orphaned by virtue of pointing to a
non-existent domain.  Mark Andrews promptly answered my questions and
told me to use the zone statement to avoid the SOA query error problem
when nsupdate determines that the CNAME points to nothing useful.

	This is all very straight-forward, but I am obviously doing
something wrong.  Here is a capture of what happens.

bash-2.05b$ nsupdate -d -k keydir/Kkeyname 
Creating key... 
> zone okstate.edu 
> update delete surefail.okstate.edu IN CNAME 
> 
Reply from SOA query: 
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 15464 
;; flags: qr rd ra ; QUESTION: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 
;; QUESTION SECTION: 
;surefail.okstate.edu.		IN	SOA 
 
 
response to SOA query was unsuccessful 
bash-2.05b$ exit 

	Could this be related to Verisign's wild card games they are
playing?  The surefail.okstate.edu CNAME points to a dot com domain
which has vanished from the Earth.

	The effect is that one can create a CNAME record quite
normally, but that record is unremovable after it is in.

	I created this example using the "script" utility so I could
interact with nsupdate, but I get identical results when feeding
nsupdate via a file.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group