setting up free-parking

[Barry Margolin]

In article <c56agn$fmk$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 Jeff Lasman <blists at nobaloney.net> wrote:

> I know free parking isn't as big as it once was, but since we sell 
> domain registration we want our servers to automagically point newly 
> registered domains to our freeparking page until people either choose 
> new nameservers or buy hosting with us.
> 
> I've decided this will work, but I'd like your input:
> 
> 1) we've made our master and slave nameservers non-recursive.  We don't 
> use them for resolving the internet at large, and we've told our 
> clients to not use them.

Good idea.

> 2) Now I want to crate an authoritative zone file for "." with a 
> wildcard A record.
> 
> Will this work?  If not, is there another trick?
> 
> If so, is there a good reason why we shouldn't do it this way?

It's not a good idea.  When your server responds to queries, the 
Authority Section of the reply will claim that your server is 
authoritative for the root zone.  Many servers will cache this 
information, replacing the true root servers in their caches, and then 
all their lookups will redirect to your parking server.

What you should do is create a generic zone file that resolves @ and * 
to your server's address.  When a domain is registered and parked, add a 
"zone" statement to your named.conf file, and point them all to this 
zone file.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***