Joe Jared (the individual behind Osirusoft) has apparently decided to terminate the operation in a rather spectacularly obnoxious manner: returning records for all queries. The TXT records for all addresses say "Please stop using relays.osirusoft.com"
I have heard from multiple people who have been in contact with Joe that this is indeed what it appears to be: he wants everyone to stop trying to use relays.osirusoft.com NOW and it should be considered dead.
If he wants people to stop using it, why doesn't he just kill the software he's running, and post a message? I guess that's the "obnoxious manner" part of it, eh?
You won't find me defending Joe's ethics, technical ability, good judgement, or general behavior towards others.
However, while I agree this was a Bad Thing it does have some precedent and reason. Back when ORBS shut down, some sites kept querying the DNSBL zone for weeks afterwards, imposing a load on all the secondary nameservers for no reason. Eventually one of the operators of one of the secondaries made it stop by returning positive results for all queries.
Joe's action is different, but it is pretty much the only way to get the attention of everyone using the DNSBL. He has been effectively turned off for weeks by the ongoing DDoS directed at his nameservers. As of Sunday, only 2 of the 9 authoritative nameservers for relays.osirusoft.com were answering any queries, and they were carrying 9-day-old data. People who pay closer attention to what's in the list were noting in late July that the relays portion was very stale, and there were repeated incidents of inexplicable giant entries appearing in the spamsources/SPEWS piece only to vanish a day later.
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Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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