Nice Weekend

Well.

Very cool Friday night - caught up with a few people I haven't seen in ages.
Saturday spent sleeping and recovering, and then went to a party at a friends house.
Was mostly older people (early 30's).
Plenty of chefs, some TVNZ people, artists, musicians etc.
Theres something about that social group that appeals, but sometimes they can be a little too "wanky" for my taste.

It looks like InternetNZ has approved the creation of the parliament.nz 2LD.
Nothing released on their website, or the DNC's, but reading through the meeting minutes reveals it was approved some months ago.
More 2LDs of course yield more revenue for the Registrars and more choice for consumers.
On the other hand they tend to lead to duplication of domain names, and an increase in 'squatting' as companies try to obtain every iteration of their company name.

Speaking of domain names, I've been working on a side project, on and off for the last few months.
Most ISPs I have seen tend to have a slightly disorganised approach to Domain Hosting and DNS updates.
Typically their billing system, and email provisioning system is not linked to their NS servers directly (sensible!)
What the leads to however, is problems with:

Customers being billed for hosting after the domain name is transferred away
Mail servers still being setup to deliver mail for the domain locally
Customers not being billed for a hosted domain
ISP still being charged by a Registrar (if they are not one themselves) but the custy has changed the authoriative servers, and is no longer being billed by the ISP.

So - what I think is needed is a simple tool to receive inputs from two places:
ISP Billing/Provisioning System
NS - List of domains they think they are authorative for

The tool would then query the .nz root servers to see who the 'actual' host of the domain is, and output a list of domains that need to be de-provisioned, billed, or otherwise checked up on.
I'm trying to think of better ways to do it without querying the root servers constantly (local DNS server with no cache ?) and am building in a few safeguards around the number of queries/s etc.
Once I have things a bit more polished, I'm planning to approach the NZSRS people and ask about acceptable load on their servers, or if they can think of a cleaner way to do it.