On Fri, May 07, 1999 at 03:23:17PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > >Being a TLD administrator, you know as well as I do that the info in
> > >the SOA record isn't always correct, and postmaster@ addresses don't
> > >always work.
> >
> > The whois information isn't always correct either.
>
> I agree. But I'd much rather trust information that *I* (as a TLD admin)
> maintain, than SOA records that the individual domain administrators
> *sometimes* maintain.
As far as the person maintaining them, postmaster addresses and RP
records have little value -- they have value to others, but not to
the person maintaining them. DNS administrators are like everybody else
-- they priority to tasks that have real value.
There is actually a general engineering/economic principle here about
maintenance of distributed data, similar to the "Tragedy of the
Commons": Don't design systems that require goodwill to operate
correctly -- there must be a real technical, economic, or legal
incentive behind every operational requirement.
OTOH, users have a *real* incentive to keep at least their billing
contact information up to date. This spills over to keeping the
other contact data for a SLD at least somewhat up-to-date.
So, while RP and "postmaster" are nice ideas, in practice they will
never be as useful as "whois" data that is tied to the real business
identity of the registrant.
How this data is maintained and accessed is really just a technical
detail, though it needs to be standardized -- you could embed it in
DNS TXT records, or run separate oracle servers gated to port 43, or
whatever.
--
Kent Crispin "Do good, and you'll be
[EMAIL PROTECTED] lonesome." -- Mark Twain
