Lee Hinckley wrote:
At 2:46 PM -0700 9/23/03, David Schwartz wrote:
He asked for the "optimal way" "to see if a given host truly exists" and you told him how to confirm or deny the "existance of a domain". He asked about hosts, you answered about domains.
In fairness I was ambiguous. Although Verisign ought to be describing all of these techniques. But depending on the circumstances I primarily need to check for A records or MX and A records.
I was both confused and confusing myself. Previously, you could consider any response other than 'NXDOMAIN' to an 'ANY' query in the COM/NET domain to mean that the domain was registered, at least. Now you can't. There was no way to use DNS to tell for sure that a domain is available. There still isn't. There was no way to use DNS to tell for sure that a domain is registered. There still isn't. If we're going to challenge Verisign, we have to make sure we ask the right questions. One question to ask them is how are we supposed to tell whether an A record was placed by the owner of the domain. If we don't agree to SiteFinder's terms, how do we avoid using it? How do we use DNS for commercial purposes? And so on. DS