2002-09-10

About a year ago, I was at Pim "Da P" van Pelt's house. Pim runs IPng, a large ipv6 tunnel provider, together with Jeroen "Fuzzel" Massar. We talked about IPng, amongst many other things, and he told me about his ideas of this so-called 'dns spam' or 'dns pollution'. His main argument is quite simple and quite logical: the dns naming scheme is meant to be hierarchical, and not to create 'funny' or 'cool' names.

He added that nobody can force anybody to follow a certain standard, whether it's an official one or a personal one. But, since he provides a certain service to the community (IPng), he determines the conditions under which the service can be used. And he refuses to have people in his project that just use the service to get a 'cool' hostname on irc.

Since, at that time, he had about 200 users, checking whether any given user was 'abusing' his IPng-ipv6-space took a lot of time. So he had been thinking about some script to check if any hostname was, in his opinion, a violation of the hierarchical dns naming structure. I thought this was quite a challenge so I started coding on it.

This is how the script originated. It was _not_ meant to be a know-all script to tell the world how everything should be, but a tool for Pim and other network/server administrators to check whether their clients are exhibiting DNS pollution.