Bind 9, Wildcard Records and Road Runner

[Anthony Eden]

Greetings Bind users,

My name is Anthony Eden and I work for SDC Hawaii, LLC.  Our client, 
Saipan DataCom, is the registry for the .mp ccTLD.  We are
currently preparing for the public launch of the .mp domain and are
having some issues with Bind 9, wildcard records and Time Warner's Road
Runner service, which hopefully you may be able to help us out with.

A little information on the .mp domain and the dotMP service.  A portion 
of Saipan DataCom's service includes a complete end-to-end solution for 
web publishing.  Customers purchase a dotMP site and recieve a .mp 
second-level domain, a hosted web site and mobile site, email, blogging, 
photo uploads, etc.  You can view any .mp site on both your desktop 
browser and on your mobile phone.

When a .mp domain is registered their site and associated services are 
automatically created and are immediately available for the customers 
use.  We accomplish this by using a wildcard DNS record in bind for all 
.mp domains:

*.mp.                   IN      A       66.135.225.102

This record can be found in the mp zone file.  When a site doesn't exist
they still see a page displaying a message.

For most ISPs this works perfectly.  You can visit any dotMP site and it
will resolve on both your computer and mobile phone.  You can take a
look at ai.mp for an example.  In the past this also worked for Road
Runner.  However, recently it stopped working for Road Runner and thus
anyone who uses Road Runner for their ISP can not resolve any .mp domain.

Our current understanding is that Road Runner is not caching and
returning these records because there is no SOA record for each SLD.
This is true.

If you look up the SOA record for ai.mp with nslookup you will see:


> ai.mp
Server:         66.135.224.91
Address:        66.135.224.91#53

*** Can't find ai.mp: No answer

However a lookup of the A record for ai.mp will return:

> ai.mp
Server:         66.135.224.91
Address:        66.135.224.91#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   ai.mp
Address: 66.135.225.102


If you look up the SOA record for ai.mp with dig you will see:

; <<>> DiG 9.2.1 <<>> -t soa ai.mp
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 34794
;; flags: qr aa ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ai.mp.                         IN      SOA

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mp.                     43200   IN      SOA     ns1.nic.mp.
hostmaster.nic.mp. 2004082401 3600 3600 1209600 43200

;; Query time: 235 msec
;; SERVER: 66.135.224.91#53(66.135.224.91)
;; WHEN: Fri Oct  8 16:29:34 2004
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 78


We have tried working around this by using a wildcard in front of the
SOA record, but both * and *. failed, so we are looking for other
possible solutions.

Is it proper that Road Runner seems to require an SOA record for any 
host in the .mp domain?  Is there any way to have bind return an SOA
record for all hosts in the .mp domain without having to set up a zone
file for each SLD?  If all else fails would it be possible to modify
bind to have it return the same SOA record for every .mp request?

Any help on this would be greatly appriciated.  If you can point me to
an archived discussion which may help solve this problem then I would be
happy to look into that as well.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Anthony Eden