get a domain's dns records

[Phil Mayers]

On 21/01/11 13:50, Barry Margolin wrote:
> In article<mailman.1415.1295616325.555.bind-users at lists.isc.org>,
>   Joseph S D Yao<jsdy at tux.org>  wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 02:19:45PM +0800, pyh at mail.nsbeta.info wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm jsut curious, how does "who.is" know the dns records in my domain
>>> (nsbeta.info)?
>>>
>>> The page shows some of my RRs exactly:
>>>
>>> http://who.is/dns/nsbeta.info/
>>
>>
>> The title of the page is, "Nsbeta.info DNS Lookup | Nameserver Lookup -
>> Who.is - Who.is".  They probably did just exactly that - DNS lookup.
>> Anything in DNS is public information.
>
> But the nameservers for the domain don't allow public zone transfers.
> So if you know the names in the zone you can look them up, but how did
> the site list the names in his zone?
>

Most of the records are well-known (i.e. A/MX/NS/SOA on the zone apex, 
or www.zone.name) or lookups of the RHS of a well-known. The site 
appears to probe for "test.zone.name".

So it didn't "list" the zone. It looked up some well-known names and RRs 
and got replies.