A coworker and I were arguing a bit yesterday about how to move/change a nameserver...

[Michael Kjorling]

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On Jan 30 2002 14:30 -0500, Ron Watkins wrote:

> He is of the opinion that if we want to move or change a nameserver, that
> we need only move it and change or delete the relevant NS record.  I
> believe that this is inadequate; I very strongly believe that since it is
> listed with the whois database, that we are being bad neighbors by not
> keeping our whois record updated with accurate information, and further
> will be causing erroneous queries to a server that is no longer available.

You are correct - the delegation should be updated in the parent zone,
including any relevant glue records.


> We got into a further argument, wherein he believed that NS records were
> all that was necessary for a domain to resolve correctly, whereas I am
> reasonably sure that the whois records are a critical component.  IE, if I
> want to do a lookup on 'blah.example.com', the whois records are necessary
> in order to find the nameservers to do further lookups.  As far as I know,
> the Internet is not going to magically know to go query address 1.2.3.4 for
> domain 'example.com.' unless whois knows about it ahead of time.

Whois and DNS are two completely unrelated services, even though the
information they serve happens to be the same in this case. What is
important is the delegation from the parent servers (usually, the root
servers). Let's say you have a domain whatever.com. There are three
delegations involved:

	* The root zone (.)
	* The com zone, delegated from the root
	* The whatever.com zone, delegated from com to your servers

Or, you could look at it in another way: the root delegates com, which
delegates whatever.com. But the name server has to start somewhere.

Not updating the delegation at the parent can not only cause queries
to take a long time to complete (which in itself is bad) but also
means that if the (most likely single) server which has a correct
delegation from the parent goes off line, so does your entire domain
once the TTLs on the NS records have expired.


> I thought I'd post this here as a sanity check -- am I mistaken?  He was
> really fervent about his belief that whois is deprecated.
>
> Thanks!
>
> <<RON>>

Whois is not deprecated, but it and DNS serves altogether different
purposes.


Michael Kjörling

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