While it would not be appropriate for me to comment on the alien/terminator issue, this is a generic issue I've seen lots before and the reasons then were always down to the notion of 'best practice' changing over the years rather than anyone being dumb. Before I explain that, here's some terminology to make this easier. When the nameservers for a domain are within that domain then we call them 'in-bailiwick'. So if daley.org.nz is served by ns1.daley.org.nz then that's an in-bailiwick nameserver. When an in-bailiwick nameserver is used in an NS record then the IP address is needed otherwise there's an unresolvable circularity, and this IP address is what we call 'glue'. As Don has noted in .nz we only publish glue for in-bailiwick nameservers. The situation that some have comes down to them being both registrars and hosting providers and they have ended up having three different types of domains served on their authoritative servers: a) those that use out-of-bailiwick nameservers and so can be migrated by a simple address change. b) those that use in-bailiwick glue and for whom they are the registrar. These can be migrated by getting a list from the registry and then changing the glue at the registry. Not trivial but fairly straightforward. c) those that use in-bailiwick glue but for whom they are *not* the registrar. These are the nightmare because they can't look them up at the registry as registries prevent registrars from looking at each others domains, and they can't change them even if they did know what they are because they are managed by another registrar. You might suggest that they should have better records, but multiple organisational changes often mess that up. You might also suggest that they should never accept c) in the first place, but doing that risks losing customers. I host all my personal domains with one company, but for some of them I do not use them as the registrar for historical or practical reasons and if my hosting company did not host 'foreign' domains for me then I would switch to one that did. cheers Jay -- Jay Daley Chief Executive .nz Registry Services (New Zealand Domain Name Registry Limited) desk: +64 4 931 6977 mobile: +64 21 678840