[100162] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: dns authority changes and lame servers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Lewinski)
Thu Oct 18 18:22:38 2007
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:19:24 -0600
From: Mike Lewinski <mike@rockynet.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20071018212045.GF29777@dba3>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> I don't think this is a "flaw in the DNS system" as much as it is a
> consequence of the funny economics currently on display among domain
> name registrars, DNS operators, and ISPs.
I suppose it is a social problem at the very bottom here. If my users
were educated enough to notify me when they moved authority I wouldn't
have this problem. Maybe it's not fair to ask the Registrars/Roots to
provide updates when it's really incumbent on their customers to do so.
But then I start to balk -- any process that involves duplicate updates
of one piece of information in two disparate systems is inefficient at
best, and inherently prone to these kind of errors even with good
intentions.
There is an economic factor at play in our smaller scale operation. It's
barely worth the time of billing to track all these "free" dns hostings.
If we charged for it, the customers might be more attentive and notify
us in order to be released from the charges (but likely we can't charge
enough to really even make it worth their time either).
At one level this is all a minor nuisance. Then I hear of the customer
who, doing business with another former customer in the same building,
spent a year printing out and walking over their emails because they
were too lazy to call us and find out why they weren't getting through.
I can pretty fairly claim that's "not our fault" that no one bothered to
ask us to remove the cruft, but the customers on the receiving end of
the DNS black hole just know that our DNS server was "broken" and
"didn't get an update" and next week they'll be calling me asking me to
"update my cache" when they can't get to foobar.com.