Hi Daniel,

I'll reply off-list just for the mo .. allowing time for headscratching!

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Lucian Daniel Kafka wrote:

 > >here are my results.  Are all the authoritative servers for *(?).gov.au
 > >really not redundant outside ausregistry's scope?  It seems that one of
 > >these four servers is likely to be on a different network, but hmmm?
 > 
 > 
 > During the downtime, the ausregistry domain itself could not be looked up. 
 > Maybe this has something to do with the name servers on an ausregistry 
 > domain not being resolvable.

Quite likely then, sure; I only read about it later - but what's up now? 
And does ausregistry going down - as must we all, sometimes eh? - mean
that nsw, vic etc start to disappear?  Surely the guv's safer than that? 

Another lack of redundancy (ie of the registry function, as opposed to
actual operation of the distributed (mostly bind) processes chattering
away out there), also not as the DNS designer gods would have had it. 

But then, four hour (apparent) syncronisation of major DNS servers looks
like quite a window of opportunity for a swarm of robots these days .. 

The whois hijack below (if that's what it is) smells of 'classic' DNS
poisoning of some sort - I recall seeing dotster, among others, being
promoted to the authoritative servers for .com and .org maybe 3 years
ago?  Fun nights poring through level 2, sometimes 3 named.run logs :)

 >     Server Name: GOV.AU
 >     Registrar: DOTSTER, INC.
 >     Whois Server: whois.dotster.com
 >     Referral URL: http://www.dotster.com/help/whois
 > 
 > 
 >  >>> Last update of whois database: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 17:12:28 EST <<<

Same here, perhaps 'everywhere' for a time.  Oooo ..

Cheers, Ian