Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!karl_kleinpaste From: karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains Subject: A plea for care when faking top-level domains Message-ID: Date: 18 Jul 90 13:18:53 GMT Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 70 I know that, periodically, people have a need to fake a top-level domain for one reason or another. No real argument with that; sometimes it seems to make sense. But it becomes a real problem when the bogus information bleeds outside of your own domain. In poking at my nameservers for nic.ddn.mil, the authority section contained the following fascinating set of purported root servers: | For authoritative answers, see: | . 0 IN NS NS.NIC.DDN.MIL | . 0 IN NS NS.NASA.GOV | . 0 IN NS TERP.UMD.EDU | . 0 IN NS A.ISI.EDU | . 0 IN NS AOS.BRL.MIL | . 0 IN NS GUNTER-ADAM.AF.MIL | . 0 IN NS C.NYSER.NET | . 0 IN NS munnari.OZ.AU | . 0 IN NS localhost Ahem. Munnari should not be there, and I assure you that I'm making no attempt to arrogate root server status to myself. The TTLs leave me feeling kinda woozy. Bunches of my nameservers are infected with this information, even some my slave servers doing nothing but serving workstation subnets. All four of my primary nameservers have it; three of those four also have more than one SOA RR for `.'; and one of those has no less than FIVE, two of which are bogons: . 85638 IN SOA NS.NIC.DDN.MIL HOSTMASTER.NIC.DDN.MIL( 900716 ;serial (version) 1800 ;refresh period 300 ;retry refresh this often 604800 ;expiration period 86400 ;minimum TTL ) . 68523 IN SOA NS.NIC.DDN.MIL HOSTMASTER.NIC.DDN.MIL( 900712 ;serial (version) 1800 ;refresh period 300 ;retry refresh this often 604800 ;expiration period 86400 ;minimum TTL ) . 12367 IN SOA NS.NIC.DDN.MIL HOSTMASTER.NIC.DDN.MIL( 900709 ;serial (version) 1800 ;refresh period 300 ;retry refresh this often 604800 ;expiration period 86400 ;minimum TTL ) . 10357 IN SOA Himmelsborg.dna.lth.se hostmaster.sunic.sunet.se( 1990070502 ;serial (version) 28800 ;refresh period 7200 ;retry refresh this often 604800 ;expiration period 86400 ;minimum TTL ) . 12562 IN SOA nic.nordu.net hostmaster.nic.nordu.net( 900702 ;serial (version) 28800 ;refresh period 7200 ;retry refresh this often 604800 ;expiration period 86400 ;minimum TTL ) Mental violence manifested before us all. Yowza. If it matters, I'm running UToronto BIND 4.8.2 on assorted Pyramids. Prettyplease, be careful when you do this sort of thing... --karl