> 2) Neither Tanner nor Jon touched on who you actually need to contact to
> update the information in the "whois" record. There's a good buzzword
> name for that company or entity, which I'm sure they both know, but
> neglected to mention directly.
As Ian mentioned, that would be your registry. That used to be only
Network Solutions but when the system was opened up for more
registries they distributed the whois information. Verisign (who bought
Network Solutions), however, maintained control over the main root
nameserver. This is how, a couple of years ago, they started redirecting
mistyped domain names that weren't registered to their own
web page saying "buy this domain". Instead of returning "unknown
domain" to something like "unregistereddomainanme.com" they would
return an A record for their web server. This upset MANY people because
it broke a LOT of assumptions, not the least of which was that an easy
spam check is to see if the return address domain exists or not, and
one of the main things to come out of that was an option in bind to
delegate certain domains as "delegation only". That is, bind, when
it goes to a nameserver for a particular portion of a hostname, say "com"
can be configured to only accept a delegation response (that is, a response
that's like the ones above, "I don't know but ask this nameserver over there.").
It's also worth noting that a lot of things fail "harder" if the DNS
lookup fails. I know that my mailserver gives an instant bounce if the
DNS will not lookup. This is why it's important two have redundancy in
your nameservers. It's benefitial for services to know that the server
for bob.org is SUPPOSED to be at 1.2.3.4, even if 1.2.3.4 is down
right now.
--
Jason Faulkner
http://oldos.org
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