1) Does anyone else find this flaw in the DNS system as annoying as I do? If authority is to be regularly moved around between ISPs (who may be hosting thousands
As an operator of both free and paid DNS services, I wish there was a quick and easy way to pull a list of all of the zones that were delegated to a specific IP address. I say IP because people can now register their own DNS name servers at the registrar and use our IP addresses, so using the "official" hostname isn't even fool-proof. Being able to pull such an "official" list for forward DNS zones would certainly make life easier. We also have home-grown scripts that figure out whether a domain is delegated to us or not and flag the ones that aren't. In the case of the free service we flag them for two weeks and if they still aren't delegated to us after that period we disable them on the DNS servers but leave the domain in their account. In the case of the paid service we make a note of the status in the database but do not make any changes to the account (they're paying us, after all, to have it there). We don't do recursive lookups so it's not an issue (even though it's technically an RFC violation, if I remember correctly). I suppose the problem with having an official list to query would be getting all of the various registries to participate and keep it regularly updated. I personally qualify this as a slight inconvenience, but I'm not sure I would call it a flaw in the DNS system. -Justin Scott