Subject: Re: OT: nslookup -q=soa bogus.bogus.com

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 May 2007 09:30:49 +0200

Harald Alvestrand wrote:

>> `nslookup -q=soa bogus.bogus.com` results in an error
>> with my version of nslookup, it gives up for NXDOMAIN.

> I was talking about Charles' tree-climbing exercise; if you cut off
> labels until you find something, you will eventually look up ".com".

In his example he'd arrive at bogus.com (that exists) with tree
walking.  It's odd that there is no clear distinction between
the two cases "yes, this is my domain, and what I do below it
is none of your business" and "yes, this is my domain, but I'm
not responsible for anything below it that doesn't exist (yet)."

Frank

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 May 2007 09:41:25 +0200

Charles Lindsey wrote:

> USEAGE could try to pick up the pieces.

If it starts by recommending _one_ news role acoount out of the
three proposals (two in 2142 + two in s-o-1036) it can try that.

In a parallel article you said about the "zone cut" odditites:

| Interestingly, the DKIM WG has been looking at this, and to
| do it properly you really need some widely publicised and
| maintained list of TLDs/zones.

The SURBL list is nice, but it's no IANA registry or something,
some entries in this list are there because I submitted them
(e.g. enum.arpa), IOW it's far from complete or reliable.  No
uri.arpa and no urn.arpa (examples) if it's still at the state
I know.

The CSV strategy was also cute, but it was a kludge, something
in the direction of "try direct, if that fails strip to seven
labels or what you have minus the already tested direct FQDN,
test that, and then test up to the SLD, never bother the TLD".

Don't nail me about CSV details, please.

Frank

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:40:15 GMT

In <[email-masked]> Russ Allbery <[email-masked]> writes:

>It's a minor point, and somewhat off-topic, but I feel obligated to point
>out whenever it seems appropriate that hosts running SMTP daemons with A
>records do not need MX records.  A remarkable number of people (which I
>expect does *not* include you -- this was just a rant trigger) seem to be
>confused about this these days and write stupid spam filtering software
>under the assumption that A records are not sufficient for delivering
>e-mail.

Yes, I knew that, but a pure news server with an A record might not be
listening on Port 25 at all. In that case, an MX (probably pointing to the
site's mailhost) would be a good idea.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: [email-masked]      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5