On 27-Feb-2008, at 05:18, Simon Lyall wrote:
Ok, I just spent 10 minutes googling around but no luck. [1]
Why does .com and some other TLDs require that name servers be registered?
Different registries are designed in different ways. Verisign-operated registries have long had a data model that includes both host and domain objects, with relational links between them. When the effort began to implement something akin to Verisign's Registry- Registrar Protocol (RRP) as the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) at the IETF, many facets of the Verisign data model were inherited. Since this data model was by no means universal, I believe (although I haven't bothered to go back and check the archives) that EPP was extended to accommodate domain objects with embedded references to nameservers, rather than references to host objects. Regardless, several large registries (all those run by Verisign, and all those run by Afilias, for example) include host objects in their schema today. So, COM, NET, ORG, INFO, MOBI, AERO, etc have this requirement. If you're bringing new a new nameserver (by which I mean a new DNS name to be used in NS RDATA) which you intend to use in general- purpose delegation from TLDs, it's good practice to arrange for corresponding host objects to be added in all the registries you expect to deal with. With the Tucows reseller interface that I happen to have access to the appropriate link to look for is "Add nameserver to all foreign registries". I just added a couple of hosts for Dan Langille, and I see that the corresponding host objects now show up at whois.verisign- grs.com. Several people in this thread have confused the global, distributed database called the DNS with the individual, non-distributed databases operated by particular registries. Just because the data in the latter is used to contribute towards the former doesn't mean that their schemas or data models need to be identical. Joe