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Re: DNS Registration (or: the chicken and the egg)



Eli,

>I hope to be on air again on Sunday (I have a frame-relay which was
>connected to StarNet Za"L). Meanwhile, I try to configure my own
>primary DNS, and enter into a problem of a chicken and an egg:
>
>The IP of most of the domains is decided by accessing a primary DNS
>which is part of these domains. e.g. try the command:
>	whois -h whois.ripe.net globes.co.il
>and you'll find that Globes' primary DNS is dns.globes.co.il
>But in order to access dns.globes.co.il, you need its IP, and in
>order to have its IP you need its DNS, which is the same one...
>
>I know, when you register a primary DNS you give its IP to registrar,
>but it is not registered in the actual record in Internic/RipeNet/etc.
>And I know, there are secondary DNSs which can be used instead of the
>primary (Globes' secondary, in the above example, is Netvision). But
>if the primary is unusable, why do we need it at all?  Give Simon (or
>any registrar you contact) only the secondary and that's all...
>
>To be sure, I asked Simon, and he acknowledged that no IP is
>registered, so I don't know how to register elmar.co.il by the
>primary DNS ns.elmar.co.il...

"DNS and BIND" (an O'Reilly book) will give you a good description of
the structure of DNS.

I'll make the reply short, as it's offtopic; I did keep it on the list,
since others may be confused by the above description.

The point is, that the databases you look in (Internic, RIPE etc.)
are not operational DNS databases. The DNS tree itself *does* contain
a pointer to the primary DNS of each zone. To take on your example -
globes.co.il: In the DNS for co.il, there are *two* records for it.
One NS record, specifying that "the next-level DNS for globes.co.il
is dns.globes.co.il", and one A record, specifying "the IP address
for dns.globes.co.il is 194.90.153.130". (Actually, there are usually
more than two but nevermind).

This should complete your puzzle with the bootstrap problem, I guess.

Doron Shikmoni