[registrars] FWD: Message from Richard Lindsay

["Michael D. Palage" <michael@palage.com>]

Rick,

Thanks for your very quick response... what are you
doing up still :-)  Same for you Mike (guess I am still
on the list with my old address...)

I know that the issue has been around, but when
we have brought up the issue, and how it affects us,
with Verisign a few months ago, we realized (perhaps belatedly)
that we would have to check each of the reported orphans.
With a few thousand of these, and with a very overworked
staff, it is hard to find the time to either write
our own tools, or do this by hand.  I was curious as
to how registrars with large numbers of orphans handled
both the investigation and the follow up.

Another problem we face, is that the vast majority of the
problems are our customer name servers.  While I
am pretty confident that they have mis-configured their
DNS, it is always a challenge to inform them of this
while keeping a "customer is always right" approach.
In the same vein, the "kill the messenger" reply is also
not unusual, when we have to tell a customer that what
he/she thought was working just fine, won't work any
more.

Cheers,
Richard

PS:  In addition to the link Rick mentioned, the following
is a good (but technical) summary of how to deal with orphan
A records.  It is not very useful for the customer of course :-(

http://www.verisign-grs.com/support/orphan.html

Rick Wesson wrote:

> Richard,
> 
> Registrars need to review the list of orphaned A name servers, it is at
> http://www.verisign-grs.com/orphan/ I think the page is its password
> protected. I believe there is also a report that is made available with
> the other regular reports available via ftp that will list all the
> orphaned A name servers under a registrars direct control.
> 
> The first notice we had about the program to clean the A records out of
> the CNO zones was in Marina Del Rey in Nov 2001 and again at our RC
> conference in DC around the end of Feb 2002.
> 
> We have had ample time to reflect on the consequence... as to how to best
> handle the issue -- either registrars will delete the NS records or the
> registry will. Take it as an opportunity to contact your registrants and
> test out those contact e-mail addresses.
> 
> I take it everyone understands what an orphaned A record is, why they are
> there and the trouble the cause. If not I'll provide a short note on the
> what,why and how on orphaned A's
> 
> -rick