[ppml] Comments on ARIN's reverse DNS mapping policy

[arno meulenkamp]

On Sep 11, 2007, at 1:18 PM, McTim wrote:

> On 9/11/07, John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org> wrote:
>> At 10:30 AM +0100 9/11/07, <michael.dillon at bt.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Just sending email to POCs offering in-addr.arpa is not enough.  
>>> An email
>>> message to POCs should ask for DNS server administrator contacts.  
>>> Then
>>> these people, who can be expected to have a better understanding  
>>> of the
>>> technical issues as well as the ability to act and put in-addr.arpa
>>> zones in nameservers, could be offered the service. It wouldn't  
>>> be a bad
>>> idea to also send some material by postal mail to Domain Name  
>>> Service
>>> Administrator c/o Network Operator, in cases where the POC  
>>> request fails
>>> to elicit a viable response.
>>
>> Does anyone know how this issue is handled in other regions?
>
> In RIPEland there is a rev-srv: attribute whose value is meant to  
> be the email
> address of the person handling reverse.  This is being deprecated  
> however,
> since it has only been used sparingly by only a very few folk.
>
> Mr. Van Essen has hinted that the block in question may be a /16, in
> which case it seems that perhaps his upstream might not know they can
> do reverse on the whole /16 in one go, and not need to reverse
> individual /24s.

Actually, for address space obtained in the RIPE region, the reverse  
DNS is handled through domain objects in the RIPE database. The rev- 
srv attribute in the inetnum objects is legacy and pointed to the DNS  
servers that were supposed to handle reverse DNS for that address space.

On another note.. I don't see an issue with the lack of PTR records  
for a given rDNS name. An NXDOMAIN answer is just as fast as an  
answer with a PTR record. I have no opinion on wether the RIRs should  
or should not police lameness in the reverse zones though. :)

regards,

Arno