Bleeding edge technology? Definitely not. However, Public Administrations seem to ignore some well known recommendations (RFC 1033, RFC 1912) for their Internet presence and services.

This article shows the current status of italian ministries’ (or departments’) mail exchangers: domain, IP (IN A record), pointer (IN PTR record).

We examined 25 domain names according to those listed on http://www.governo.it/Governo/Ministeri/ministeri_gov.html

Out of 25 domain names, just 1 has not an IN MX record at all (salute.gov.it).

8 domain names have just 1 IN MX record published in their DNS zones.

For 25 domain names we found 35 MX records, 34 of them have at least 1 IP address (IN A record). Out of 34 IP addresses, 33 have at least 1 pointer (IN PTR record).

6 MX records have mismatching pointers, but 1 of those pointers (belonging to giustizia.it) is a not existing domain (89-119-250-66-static.albacom.net). This is a curious case: that wrong record is still there after having informed (two weeks ago) the relevant ICT team.

Also, it has been reported on the on-line forum for ICT operators of public administrations (in italian): http://forum.opensipa.it/t/il-caso-giustizia-it-e-i-ptr-di-albacom/

Details can be found in the following file: Italian Government MX PTR

20150313 UPDATE1
Kind reply from tech guy just arrived. We settled on some tests to run together.

20150325 UPDATE2
Too good to be true, I know. To date no test has been made and actually nobody from giustizia.it seems interested in fixing things and running systems smoothly. After all, it’s harder than it looks getting attention from the right people but I tried.

proof of concept:

seq 1 255|while read n;do echo 'HOST: '89.119.250.$n; \
dig -x 89.119.250.$n +short|while read host; \
do echo 'RR IN PTR: '$host; \
echo 'RR IN A: '`dig $host A +short`; \
echo;done;done

look at the result: 20150325_rev_albacom_net.txt

Reverse DNS lookup for Italian Government’s mail exchangers (UPDATES 1-2) by Antonio Prado is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International