HACKER Q&A
📣 domain-tempacct

Independently Recreate Zone Records?


Hi, we discovered that our registrar had nearly tripled our prices by adding thousands of dollars of services to our dozens of domains without permission (privacy, hosting, etc)

When we called them to ask when this was authorized, we were told they would refund up to three days' worth

So, we took one of the three accounts and moved all the domains off of it.

When we said we felt that it wasn't appropriate that they wouldn't tell us when the costs were authorized or refund us, and we'd already closed one account in protest, our other two accounts were locked, we were given the transfer codes, and we were told to hit the bricks

The thing is, the domains are complicated. There's a lot of records on them. And the registrar refuses to give us the zone records. This seems like a real problem.

Is there a tool to recreate the zone records from the outside using things like dig and nslookup?

We really don't have the ability to remake these domains by hand


  👤 anderiv Accepted Answer ✓
This won’t help you solve your current problem, but perhaps may be helpful for you and any others reading this in the future:

I can’t recommend enough using a tool like dnscontrol [0] to manage your records. It allows you to keep your records in git and deploy changes to them in a controlled manner. Nightmares about situations like the one you’re in were what finally motivated me to implement dnscontrol ~10 years ago.

[0] https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol


👤 ggm
Can you use the AXFR or IXFR command to list the zone?

Do you have e.g. a bind .jnl file of one of the NS behind the zone, because you can re-create the text form of the zone from the binary zone state in journal.

Do you know how to talk to the Registry, rather than a registrar, because you own the domain, and even under contract for service, its your name, not their name unless you signed a very awkward contract.

Do you have a lawyer? I think you need one.


👤 icedchai
Do you happen to know all of the hostnames / subdomains? Or can you scrape that from their web UI? Without the ability to transfer the zone or get the actual zone file, perhaps you can "export" each record with something like a "dig -t ANY host.example.com" for each record. Not fool proof, but better than nothing...

👤 siegel
Where is your domain registrar? Are they in the US? (And are you in the US?) These folks are obviously scammers and you need to have a lawyer reach out to them.

👤 cjbprime
If you use TLS on the subdomains, they may all be the public Certificate Transparency logs.