On 28/03/12 16:07, Don Stokes wrote: 
On 28/03/12 14:09, Simon Lyall wrote:


I'm still pointing and laughing.

DNS registrations are done by name, DNS resolvers are referenced by IP.
So all they need to do is change the IP addresses that
"alien.xtra.co.nz" and "terminator.xtra.co.nz" point to. Turn off
recursive service at those new addresses, and stop making excuses for
failing to meet industry best practice for well over a decade.

The only complication is where domain owners used their own NS records
for registrations and publish their own glue records into their upstream
registries/zones. I'm pretty sure Xtra didn't normally allow that, so I
wouldn't imagine there would be very many.

I note Don that your own domain name has IP's published into the registry (viewed via whois), not just DNS hostnames.

If your user-interface for customers registering new domain names or modifying their domain NS records makes it clear that IP's are optional, then you're better than many I've dealt with over the years.

In practise the domain name registration forms have (forever that I recall) asked for IP addresses for registrations when carried out, and in most circumstances, these have been provided. Indeed I expect many registrants have set these fields as compulsory in the past?  And even when not, isn't it good practice to specify the IP addresses when you figure that those will work, even if xtra.co.nz's zone get's busy/unresponsive or is accidentally left to expire or broken in some way? (insulating you from the problems this causes, in the knowledge that the IP's are very unlikely to change in the near future?)

Noting that many domain names held with Xtra are there for legacy reasons (eg, back-in-the-day that's who they used, and noone's bothered moving to a cheaper/better registrar), I don't hold out much hope that many customers have alien/terminator specified without also specifying IP addresses.

Back in the days when I provided technical support for domain name registrations at Xtra, i'm pretty sure we specified both IP's and Hostnames for everything we registered[1], as it was considered normal, good practise, at the time - it's only in recent years that i've started leaving the IP's out and relying on DNS.  But only where the DNS zone i'm relying on is one that I have some faith in, and/or one where I can take responsibility for any muckups that may occur (eg one I manage myself).

Cheers
Mark.

[1] Pretty sure this applied when we were registering domains ourselves on behalf of customers using the Xtra UI; Doing the same via third party registrar UI's based on customer requests (notably Domainz, a legacy from when they monopolised this space) and also when advising customers what details to use if they were doing it themselves (obviously we'd have to provision zones for them first) - I don't recall ever advising customers to only use the DNS names for the servers.  This is in the early-to-mid-2000's.