[At-Large] Impressions from the Whois-Review

Lutz Donnerhacke lutz at iks-jena.de
Thu Feb 3 08:57:48 UTC 2011


* Karl Auerbach wrote:
> By-the-way, several years ago a suggestion was made (I believe by Kent 
> Crispin) that those who have a domain name create a set of text records 
> under the name "whois.name.tld" that would give the contact information 
> that that person desires to make public.
>
> For instance, I've got TXT records under the name whois.cavebear.com

I also took this approach for my private TLD "bofh" (@2001:4bd8:1::1).
Unfortunly it does not work for two reasons:

  a) Whois was designed to be an out of band way to contact the responsible
     person in order to repair broken network or host setups. So any in band
     communication is not available in the case it's desperatly needed.

  b) Whois should contain the data of the delegatee from the delegator.
     DNS only provides glue at the delegator site. So there es no way to
     provider the correct information using DNS.

Example:

$ dig axfr bofh @2001:4bd8:1::1 | grep alt-f4.*TXT
alt-f4.bofh. [...] TXT "Dominik ..."

$ dig TXT alt-f4.bofh. @2001:4bd8:1::1 +norec 
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;alt-f4.bofh.                   IN      TXT
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
alt-f4.bofh.            86400   IN      NS      susi.studfb.unibw-muenchen.de.


So putting Whois into DNS is the wrong approach.



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