Getting hold of serial numbers

[Johnathan Long]

In article <cpqprj$29cb$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 Barry Margolin <barmar at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> Why do people keep saying this?  The delegations in the GTLD servers 
> come from the registries, and the registrars provide WHOIS servers that 
> work off the same data that they send to the registry.

Because not all registrars properly update their WHOIS listing when they 
change the delegation for a domain. Ideally the data in WHOIS should 
always be the same as what is in the TLD servers, but in reality there 
are many cases where this fails.

> If you ever see a difference between WHOIS and a delegation, it's either 
> because you caught it during a change window (the WHOIS database has 
> updated, but the changes haven't propagated to the GTLD servers) or 
> something is broken in the process of feeding data from registrar to 
> registry to DNS.

Yes, and that condition is far more common than one would hope.

-- 
J. Long