tallshipFuckers.
I will always be BT74, going back all the way to NIC.DDN.MIL aka, yet another nom de plume of SRI, or, as was affectionately referred to as, "The NIC".
Back in the mid-80's after we introduced DNS in 1985 (and even before), you could actually call up Jake Feinler directly over the phone for time sensitive issues of a priority nature. She was always able to get things resolved in a matter of hours - sometimes I'd get a call back in a few minutes from an engineer at SRI to confirm that all was well.
according to the man pages, you should still be able to a #WHOIS searches #NIC handles for "NET-...", POCs like my handle above (um... sort of, I'll get to that), etc.
So I should note, that the NIC Handle I've listed above hasn't actually been searchable for quite some time now (at least ten years). but you should still be able to grep for it (coz I've made certain to still listed that way in my registry records). A simple, elegant system that lends well it's usage to humans, is now being cast aside for something less readable and in many ways, relevant, when you're quickly trying to pull a piece of primary data to reach someone responsible for a contact point (PoC), with respect to themselves, their property, or a "Role Account" that is responsible for a resource and shared by perhaps, several individuals.
So, the various contacts in the WHOIS records are variously, Registrant, Admin, Tech, and Billing contacts. In reality (and I've not seen a change in the RFCs on this point, but I don't follow that closely nowadays), the TECH CONTACT is defined as the person or role account responsible for the direct administration of DNS - not neccessarily the same as any other contact role account. ADMIN is important too, but not really as important as the TECH contact. In theory and still many times in practice, a remote sysadmin somewhere needs to get ahold of the DNS administrator to report abuse or some other issue, so a WHOIS is performed and voila! - you have a contact point to help fix a technical situation.
REGISTRANT is the owner of the domain registration, and as such, might legitimately have a reason to pay a privacy bureau to act as a proxy for contacting (to block stalkers, spammers, whatev), and the BILLING contact really has little technical relevance, but unlike the REGISTRANT, is the actual person or role account to interact with when it comes to domain renewals, etc.
So the ADMIN and at the very least, TECH contacts must (or should) be live phone and/or Fax numbers and email addresses that are searchable and reachable by anyone. In reality, however, after #NSI started to become less of a NIC, and shed themselves of the internic.net moniker as they commercialized under pressure from the nascent ICANN in order to have their contract renewed, anyone who registered a domain ended up having the fields to all of the contacts being filled out with the same data as that of the* registration owner/admin*, instead of what it should have been for at least the TECH and ADMIN contacts - you can override these defaults, but most will never bother, and have no idea why there are all these various roles in the records. (/me sighs....).
Okay, so after Jon Postel's untimely passing, the miscreants pretending to be legitimate enough to bootstrap ICANN quickly came to the realization that there's really no such thing as IANA - it was just a pseudonym for Jon, who literally ran pretty much everything we hold sacred today - like, being the RFC editor, and being IANA, managing the AUTH delegations of the #ccTLDs and even the DNS root servers (litterally moved one unilaterally once). So IANA was created by these miscreant folks, like Esther Dyson and Mike Roberts - pretenders provocateur. But I digress.
So now we've got these RIRs (which is a good thing, some better than others, but still). RIPE still uses NIC-HANDLEs, and so does #ARIN.
And as I promised, my NIC-HANDLE, once and always BT74, evolved into BT74-ARIN once that RIR was created. More explanations are in the alt-text accessibility tags for the two attached images.
So I won't go on further with this historical perspective that just sort of quietly was usurped by commercial pressures in the special interest lobby sector, #ICANN, and #WIPO, but anyone who's really interested can check out and read my friend Ellen Rony's book about the #Domain_Wars.
But just for shits and giggles, I've included a couple of screenies attached to this post:
- my current, automatically evolved NIC-HANDLE following the formalization of ARIN, from the ARIN website, and...
- An explanation of the usage of NIC-Handle's from the current man pages of WHOIS.
I hope that helps!
All the best!
#tallship #UNIX #DNS #FOSS #systems_administration #Stanford_Research_Institute #ARPANET #MILNET #NSFNET
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