[ga] FW: VeriSign's Site Finder service

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Message from Simple DNS Plus:



-----Original Message-----
From: JH Software [mailto:support@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2003 7:34 AM
To: Russell Smith
Subject: VeriSign's Site Finder service

Dear Russell Smith,

During the last 24 hours, we have received a lot of emails from Simple DNS
Plus users about a new "Site Finder Service" just launched by VeriSign. Most
of them requesting a new feature in Simple DNS Plus to neutralize this.

What VeriSign has done is add "*.com" and "*.net" DNS wildcard records on
all the top-level DNS servers.
These wildcard records point to a search engine type website operated by
VeriSign themselves.

We assume that the intention is that any web-browser request for an
un-registered domain name under ".com" and ".net" will be directed to this
VeriSign website.
However, as of this writing the "VeriSign Site Finder" site is not
responding, and the result for most users is that any web-request for a
un-registered ".com" or ".net" domain name just takes forever to timeout in
the browser.

Some have suggested that this might be because they got a lot more traffic
than expected, and so in effect they initiated a big DDOS attack on
themselves.

For more information about this new VeriSign "service" and some of the
problems it has caused, please see 
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/16/0034210&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=
95&tid=98&tid=99

We are currently in the final stages of beta testing the next version 3.50
of Simple DNS Plus.
For more information about the new version and to download the beta, please
see http://www.jhsoft.com/beta350.htm

However because of all these user requests, we have now re-opened the
program code and added a new option to deal with this.

The "sdnsplus.ini" file will have a new setting "VSSiteFinder=<ip-address>".
Any DNS response with an IP address listed in this setting will be converted
back into a "name does not exist" (NXDomain) response as it was before.

The default is "VSSiteFinder=64.94.110.11".
If VeriSign starts using other IP addresses for this, those can be added to
this setting.

If you do not wish to use this feature (you want to use the VeriSign Site
Finder service) make sure to make this setting empty ("VSSiteFinder=").

To try the updated Simple DNS Plus version 3.50 beta 3 with this new
feature:

- Make sure you have 3.50 beta 3 installed - available for download at
http://www.jhsoft.com/beta350.htm
- Then download http://www.jhsoft.com/outbox/vssf/sdnsmain.exe to the Simple
DNS Plus directory (replacing the original).


Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Sincerely,
JH Software
http://www.jhsoft.com