On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 14:32:33 EDT, Dean Anderson said:
No, that isn't correct. If you want to purchase a domain, you have to
check the registry database via whois.
Why? As you yourself said: "It is in fact reporting that the domain is
available
for purchase".
Yes, by pointing you to a netsol server that says so. It is the servers'
web content that says this, not the fact that the wildcard exists. You
cannot use DNS to perform this check.
If there's a nameserver for the domain, and there's an active
mail host for the domain, that indicates an *IN USE* domain, as far as anybody
can tell *ON THE SMTP PORT*.
But you don't look at the SMTP port to find out of the domain is
available. No one has ever used DNS or SMTP to check on whether a domain
is purchasable. This is sophistry.
The people most "disrupted" are those that were misusing reverse DNS.
Now that reverse DNS matches on unused domains, their invalid assumptions
have lost completely whatever operational usefulness they were wrongly
perceived to have once had. But they were invalid previously. So nothing
has been broken.
--Dean