Learned something interesting

Once upon a time I said that registrars "made up" the term "registering name servers". Well I found out that you really do have to register a name server before it can be used. This is how it works.

I've written a whois client (windows console 7KB) and in the process learned a thing or two about whois. Now, even though whois doesn't have to exist for DNS to function, it is even more involved then I ever knew before.

It turns out that whois can be used to not only to look up domains, but you can look up registrars and name servers. All this info is stored in the registration database. When you register your name server, it is placed in that database. If you get errors saying that your registrar can't "confirm" your name server exists, it is because it made a whois lookup and can't find your name server in the database.

A name server's full domain must be registered before you can use it to publically host domains. It must be registered with an IP address so that your name server can be located. So let's say your domain is example.com and you want to host it yourself. You need to do at least 3 things.

You register the domain "example.com" with "My Registrar"
You register the name server "ns1.example.com" with IP 127.0.0.1
You register the name server "ns2.example.com" with IP 127.0.0.2

The domain registry does not care if more than one name server has the same IP address, however, some registrars do care.

Weren't your nameservers registered? If not how did they serve dns records? Were you using an IP address?

I like your site by the way.

of course. for me to use the ns1 and ns2 hosts for my domain to host my domain, I had to register them. However, interestingly enough, when I asked somebody to use free1.dollardns.org and free2.dollardns.org in their registration info, godaddy rejected them. I was confused cause they resolved just fine. Since then I learned how godaddy and other registrars confirm name server existance and I registered those name servers so that people could use them in their registration info.

And thanks for the compliment on my site. It's all hand coded (notepad goodness) and done all by my lonesome.

I'm a little confused or maybe not. I assume that once you register your ns1.domain as a name server with your registrar, your good. Is that correct? I have serveral sites that my namesever provides DNS for, but the sites are all hosted on my local machine, so I really don't have any experience providing DNS for remotely hosted sites. All the domains that I host have my nameserver registered as the DNS and all work. Do I need to do something else.

no, I wasn't saying that there was something people needs to do that isn't otherwise done. I was just explaining why registering name servers were necessary and how they are verified. It is only when you host DNS services that it is useful to know that you need to register name servers that are used for other domains only.