Hi all, I hope everyone is doing well. I appologise for the off topic message, but I know that a great deal of you are enthusiasts in networking, and are quite more well versed than myself in DNS, which is where my question arises. I am building a utility that checks to see if a particular domain is registered or not. Think of it like a stripped down personalize version of whois, if you will. My problem is that I have yet to figure out the absolute minimum requirement, in terms of something that can be programmatically determined, that says: hey this .com is taken. I am using the net::dns module from CPAN in my perl script, and I have tried looking at the SOA record, because that is what I have picked up from my documentation and google runs as being the absolute requirement. Yet, I still get websites like www.hospital.com And www.patient.com Which do not return SOA records to my program, yet they are owned ... I think both of those, since 1997. So, my question is, what is the absolute minimum? I would even appreciate documentation pointers, but I just can not learn DNS in and out right now, due to other job, research, and student requirements; however, I'm more than willing to RTFM, as it were, I just haven't found anything that doesn't point me to either MX or SOA records. Thanks so much for any assistance. Take care, Sina
