On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: > On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 14:32:33 EDT, Dean Anderson said: > > No, that isn't correct. If you want to purchase a domain, you have to > > check the registry database via whois. > > Why? As you yourself said: "It is in fact reporting that the domain is available > for purchase". Yes, by pointing you to a netsol server that says so. It is the servers' web content that says this, not the fact that the wildcard exists. You cannot use DNS to perform this check. > If there's a nameserver for the domain, and there's an active > mail host for the domain, that indicates an *IN USE* domain, as far as anybody > can tell *ON THE SMTP PORT*. But you don't look at the SMTP port to find out of the domain is available. No one has ever used DNS or SMTP to check on whether a domain is purchasable. This is sophistry. The people most "disrupted" are those that were misusing reverse DNS. Now that reverse DNS matches on unused domains, their invalid assumptions have lost completely whatever operational usefulness they were wrongly perceived to have once had. But they were invalid previously. So nothing has been broken. --Dean