DNS registration problems

[mike at bilow.com (Michael Bilow)]

On 2000-12-28 at 08:51 -0500, John Abreau wrote:

> On 27 Dec 2000, Derek Atkins wrote:
> 
> > There are two separate registrations that need to take place.
> > 
> > 	1) You need to register your DNS Servers in HST records.
> > 	2) You need to register your Domain Name (as a DOMAIN record)
> > 
> > Only valid HST records can be used as DNS servers.  If your DNS
> > servers are not registered HSTs, then you cannot refer to them in your
> > DOMAIN record.  Unfortunately submitting a DOMAIN request will not
> > automatically create the HST records.
> 
> Thanks; that's the detail I was unaware of.

I should read this list more often.

Technically, the registrar is supposed to create the host records for you.  
A host record results in the establishment of a non-authoritative glue
record being pushed out to the root servers.  This also means that
administration of the host records has to be handled directly by the
registry, not the registrar, since otherwise there would be no way to have
the same host shared as a name server by different domains registered with
different registrars.

Derek's terminology is correct within the scope of activity of Network
Solutions in their capacity as a registrar.  It is not quite the same in
their capacity as the registry.

There are major security implications to this issue.  If someone were to
register a host to act as a name server, which meant that the root servers
would know about it in a non-authoritative way, then the general public
would likely get its IP address from the glue records rather than from the
authoritative server.  The end result of this could be to hide all of a
domain's mail or web servers from the public.  We have actually had this
happen twice (due to errors, not malice) and in neither case was the ISP
responsible able to diagnose it until we were called in.

-- Mike


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