GTLD Servers Report Different IP Address Than Zone Files

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Barry" == Barry Margolin <barmar at alum.mit.edu> writes:

    >> BTW, it's stupid and pointless to use a whois server to check
    >> on what information is in the DNS. These are different
    >> protocols and they provide different data. That data may not
    >> even come from the same source. Just because some name and IP
    >> address is in some TLD's whois database doesn't mean it'll be
    >> in the TLD's zone file. Or vice versa.

    Barry> Aren't the zone files for the domains hosted by the GTLD
    Barry> servers produced from the same database that WHOIS queries?

Not necessarily. In an ideal world they should be. However it depends
on the whois server and a registry's operations. [They might update
the DNS more frequently than they update any whois database, assuming
there is a definitive one.] Even the whois servers for gTLD registrars
don't give the same answer for some gTLD name that's looked up. I
tried one name at random against three gTLD registrar whois servers
and got three different answers. One was correct. Another returned a
"referral" to the whois server that held the correct data. The third
said "no match": presumably it only answers for the names that were
registered through that registrar. I wouldn't get that behaviour if
I'd queried 3 different gTLD name servers.

Besides, the point I was making was that if someone wants to check DNS
data, they should be doing a DNS lookup, not querying some whois
server. The two things are different protocols serving different data.
The same username and password database probably underpins access to a
box providing telnet and FTP service. But if someone wanted to do some
file transfers, they wouldn't use the telnet protocol, would they?