Forward requests from registrar to black hole / captive portal DNS?

Question

I have a number of domains that that I would like to set to change the nameserver for to rewrite.mydomain.org. The goal is to have any domain names with this nameserver be routed to a specific Apache vhost for being rewritten.

The A record for rewrite.mydomain.org exists, pointing to a server running BIND in a black hole configuration. I'm getting a variant of the message "Records for could not be updated. The nameserver you chose may not be a valid nameserver. Please verify with the provider and try again." from a couple different service providers. What am I missing?

options {
        pid-file        "/var/run/named/pid";
        allow-query     { any; };
        allow-recursion { none; };
};

zone "." {
     type master;
     file "/var/named/chroot/etc/db.catchall.conf";
};

And the catchall definition:

$TTL    604800
@       IN      SOA     . root.localhost. (
                              1         ; Serial
                         604800         ; Refresh
                          86400         ; Retry
                        2419200         ; Expire
                         604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL

                         IN     NS      .
.                        IN     A       X.X.137.147
*.                       IN     A       X.X.137.147

Answer 1

Your zone has a SOA of ., which your registrar may not be comfortable with. As a general rule, it's a bad idea to try to hijack . and there is no guarantee that your registrar's software will allow you to claim zone SOA that you don't actually operate.

I recommend creating a single zone file and define a new zone stanza every time you need to register a new one. You can have all of the zones share the same zone file. If this is insufficient, you will need to find software other than BIND that allows you to handle this more simply, or you will need to find a registrar who will let you get away with claiming to be something that you're not. (a root nameserver)

---

Additionally, your NS records are bogus.

• Right now you're claiming that an A record named . is your nameserver. You may be serving an A record for ., but the internet isn't.
• You are only listing one nameserver. RFCs require two.

Answer 2

Ok. I wonder also whether they are rejecting it because you are giving an invalid email address for the hostmaster (root.localhost instead of a deliverable email address). I'm assuming you have also tested with dig/nslookup directly against this test nameserver from a remote location to make sure that there is no intervening firewalls, and it is properly serving the zone(s)?