On: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of...

[jbverschoor]

In the past, many DNS servers were configured so you can execute an "ls" to list the subdomains

Nowadays most have disabled that option.

[sperwren → jbverschoor]

Do you have any references for this functionality? I’ve never encountered something like that in the RFCs, or in any server.

[kaared → sperwren]

I believe you're referring to DNS zone transfer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_zone_transfer and https://serverfault.com/questions/890153/how-does-nslookup-l...).

[sperwren → kaared]

So presumably nslookup -ls had some logic for finding the apex for a particular name, doing an AXFR and then filtering it to the the target name and below?

[jbverschoor → sperwren]

Yeah, I think it was for zone transfers. It was pretty fun discovering 'private' hosts :-)