Chris and all,

Chris Chaundy wrote:

> There have been several postings by (I would assume) US-based list members
> making the assertion that a domain is not official unless it appears in
> the InterNIC whois database!  Sigh...  If that was the case, then the great
> majority of domains in the world are not official.

  I suppose you are referring to me in this comment.  That is fine, but you are
a bit off base with you comment, if I may say so.  First of all the
InterNic's Whois facility does not just query the InterNics Database.  It also
query's the 13 Legacy Root servers as well and any other Sub Domains that
are known to those 13 Legacy Root servers.  That comprises about 98.5%
of all the known DN's that are registered.  So I find your conclusion very
misleading or you are misunderstood my previous posts on this subject.

> Please remember that a
> large proportion of the Internet exists outside of the USA.  Just for a
> start, it does not appear that most if not all subdomains of delegated ccTLDs
> are listed.

  This is also not a correct statement either.  In fact I pointed out one such
example of one that is listed that is a subdomain to .AU, that being .com.au.
There are only 4 Routable subdomains to .au back to the 13 legacy root servers
currently.  This is not to say that they are "Official" or "Authorized" crom
within
Australia, rather that the DN's registered under other subdomains/subnets to .au
are not visible globally.

  Now I would like to inject here that we currently do not see this as a right or
wrong situation per se.  Rather we believe that it is due to the current Legacy
Root server DNS system that is currently what 98.5% or the IPv4 address
space  Internet structure.  We believe that this structure is not in the best
interest of the Internet community and I have stated such on many occasions.
Hence our support for IRSC's that seek to be included or seek to change this
structure to allow for alternative gTLD's and TLD's as well as additional
interfacing IP address spaces that can expand the existing DNS and IP address
space structure.

> With the lack of a widely-used whois referral mechanism, national
> and regional NICs are not tied back to the InterNIC in an automatic fashion
> (I for one would love to see this fixed).

  This is already fixed and has been for some time.  You can use many different
Internet Network tools that are currently readily available for this purpose.  I
have mentioned a few of them earlier on this list.  Examples are SATAN/SATAN PLUS,

Enterprise Network management system (Sun Microsystems) and Netview (IBM) are
a few.  We use all of these tools and have built our own interface facility to
interface
them for better Network and Internet management.

>
>
> --
> Chris Chaundy (Core Engineering Manager)
>
> connect.com.au pty ltd, Level 9, 114 Albert Rd, Sth Melbourne, VIC 3205, Aust.
> Internet: chris§connect.com.au   Phone: +61 3 9251-3671   Fax: +61 3 9251-3666

 Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java/CORBA Development Eng.
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail jwkckid1§ix.netcom.com