A records on top level domains

After I stum­bled upon the won­der­ful URL shor­te­ner http://to/ today and imme­dia­tely began pos­ting it on IRC, I recei­ved a com­ment that someone didn’t even know that is was pos­si­ble to do so. I, of course, could only com­ment “of course it’s pos­si­ble”. But in the same train of thought, I just had to have a look at who else has a valid A record on their top level domain. So I fet­ched the IANA TLD list and, after being baff­led by the puny­code TLDs, threw some sh at the pro­blem:
(for domain in $(grep -v '^#' tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt); do host -t A "${domain}."; done) | grep -v 'has no A record'

For the sake of enjoy­a­bi­lity, I thus offer the results in table form, along with what kind of site is run­ning on port 80. Data time­stamp is 2010–01-08T16:05:00+0100, loca­tion for rou­ting is DTAG-DIAL26 / AS3320.

TLD IP con­tent (port 80)
AC 193.223.78.210 “Always con­nec­ted” (NIC.AC)
AI 209.59.119.34 “Off­shore Infor­ma­tion Services”
BI 196.2.8.205 “It works!”
CM 195.24.205.60 cm [195.24.205.60] 80 (www) : Connection refused
DK 193.163.102.23 “DK Host­mas­ter” (NIC.DK)
GG 87.117.196.80 Chan­nel Isles Domain Registration
HK 203.119.2.28 hk [203.119.2.28] 80 (www) : No route to host
IO 193.223.78.212 NIC.IO
JE 87.117.196.80 Chan­nel Isles Domain Registration
PH 203.119.4.7 HTTP 500.100 via bro­ken Micro­soft IIS
PN 80.68.93.100 Apa­che default home page
PW 203.199.114.33 pw [203.199.114.33] 80 (www) : No route to host
SH 64.251.31.234 sh [64.251.31.234] 80 (www) : No route to host
TK 217.119.57.22 “TK your long URL”, free .tk domain name registry
TM 193.223.78.213 NIC.TM
TO 216.74.32.107 TO./ URL shortener
UZ 91.212.89.8 some WAP page I can’d decipher
WS 63.101.245.10 ws [63.101.245.10] 80 (www) : Connection timed out

So, in short, 5 of 18 (27%) are down­right bro­ken, one is being autistic, and a fur­ther 2 (11%) are not con­fi­gu­red to do anything mea­ningful, lea­ding to a total of 8 — or 44% — of TLD A records being use­l­ess. Bonus: none of the sites have AAAA records and, thus, no IPv6 availability.

Friday, January 8th, 2010 Articles

5 Comments to A records on top level domains

  • Aristotle Pagaltzis says:
    2010/01/09 at 16:10

    FWIW, for learning pur­po­ses, let me point out:

    1. The sub­s­hell in your one-liner is ent­i­rely unnecessary:

    for domain in $(grep -v '^#' tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt) ; do host -t A "${domain}."; done | grep -v 'has no A record'

    2. The backticks can be avoided:

    grep -v '^#' tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt | while read domain ; do host -t A "${domain}."; done | grep -v 'has no A record'

    3. This loop can be nicely repla­ced by a use of xargs -i:

    grep -v '^#' tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt | xargs -i host -t A -W 1 {}. | grep -v 'has no A record'

  • Aristotle Pagaltzis says:
    2010/01/09 at 16:11

    (Woops, the -W 1 in the last example is a debug­ging vestige.)

  • paxed says:
    2010/01/10 at 11:17

    _nicely_ repla­ced by xargs? Sorry, xargs is not nice, it kil­led my war­hams­ter once!

  • blacky says:
    2010/01/15 at 14:20

    Also note the TLDs which have MX records, for example:

    $ host –t MX va.
    va mail is hand­led by 10 lists.vatican.va.
    va mail is hand­led by 50 proxy2.urbe.it.
    va mail is hand­led by 20 paul.vatican.va.
    va mail is hand­led by 90 john.vatican.va.
    $

  • drchaos says:
    2010/01/18 at 03:52

    http://to/ does not work at least with Fire­fox and Chro­mium. http://to./ does (but doesn’t look that good, IMHO)

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