NetRegistry.com.au Major Failure
NetRegistry DNS Zone Manager does not allow wildcard A Record for your domain!
For businesses and development companies who want to register domain name with a registrar you need to be aware of a limiting issue related to DNS entries with NetRegistry.com.au
It is a common requirement for developers to create a wildcard A record for testing their web services or proof of concept site that may have a very short life until committed to production or delivered to a customer.
Definition – Take Note NetRegistry Support
* Symbol (Wildcard) – It isn’t strange to see the * symbol be used as the name for a DNS record. This symbol is used as an indicator that the record named * should be used in place of any record that isn’t specified. These can be used when you would like to direct subdomains that do not exists somewhere where they can be accounted for or handled. This means that you can specify where you would like to send all traffic for subdomain that do not exist as a DNS record or that you might not expect people to visit. You could consider the * symbol to be the DNS record “for everything else.”
The A record is created as *.YourDomain.com on the registrars Manage DNS control panel, this essentially sends all requests to your server and allows any sub domain to reach your server which are not already defined. On your server you typically add\delete your proof of concept or development projects as require giving the developer a quick and easy way of controlling the development without the need to wait for the registrars DNS to propagate.
When companies like NetRegistry let the customer down, they can cause significant damage.
Now we have a number of domains registered with NetRegistry.com.au (a company of Melbourne IT) some of our domains have the desired *.OurDomain.con A record and others do not. If you attempt to create the desired wildcard A record at NetRegistry you will get an error message that in itself is saying that you can create the record but it refuses to allow the record.
Lets try to create a wildcard A Record on NetRegistry.com.au
After clicking [Add record] you will be greeted with the following error:
The error is completely wrong!
We attempted to work through this issue with NetRegistry’s support but we get absolutely nowhere on multiple contact attempts, we have been getting responses that simply don’t make any sense and a strong feeling that they are not domain administrators, even when asking for the issue to escalate we get substandard responses.
On one support request [name hidden] tried to tell us that all A records must be defined i.e. www, this is quite incorrect and we started to be concerned that NetRegistry support staff are not skilled in relation to DNS entries.
On another communication with NetRegistry they suggested that we could not add a wildcard A Record because we had sub domain entries already, that is www, support etc. What they suggest is absolutely incorrect you can have sub domains and a wildcard A Record, but we humored them and removed all sub domains and tried to add a wildcard A Record and again this failed. Once again the support person really demonstrated a lack of knowledge on this subject.
We finally asked NetRegistry why after migration from Uber some of our domains had a wildcard entry and others did not, and why they cannot add a wild card, the support conversation then went dead!
This is such a fundamental DNS task that NetRegistry have failed addressing after multiple calls.
To date Net Registry has not resolved this issue and the support person is not responding so all we can do is to warn others about a serious fault at NetRegistry with equally failed technical support.
The best outcome for NetRegistry customers would have been simply to manually add the wild card A Record for those who require it, if the DNS Management interface does not allow this (although we feel that the online tool has a bug).
So if your business has a requirement of wildcard A records then we strongly advise that NetRegistry is not the registrar of choice.
Senior IT Consultant
Over 30 years supporting our customers
26th March 2018 Update from NetRegistry
Sorry for the late response.
I already asked our senior team they advised me there was a restriction creating a * A records or wild card records.
They advised me that * A records was created on the old server.
Kind Regards,
[Name Hidden]
The Netregistry Team
Comment: While we appreciate that NetRegistry took the time to confirm their restriction it confirms that this is a limitation imposed by NetRegistry and not a regulatory requirement. It also raises concern when a Domain registrar has the ability to control your domain and opens further community discussions. Checking with other Domain Registrars we found that Wildcard A Records are permitted.
The fact that NetRegistry suggests that their new server does not allow the wild card A Record is also baffling as we have never seen this on any server software, so perhaps this relates more to the software used for DNS Management rather than a server restriction.
We can’t deploy
As a result of this issue we can not deploy our web services for customers who register domains with NetRegistry.com.au including our web security tools which depend on a wildcard A Record to protect customers servers.
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