] Towards the end of March, M-IT agreed not to delete all
] unpaid COM.AU domain names on March 17, 1997.

I would have said closer to the middle of March than the
end of March, to be fair to M-IT.
 
] Part of this agreement was that M-IT would provide some
] method for us to find out which of these classes domain
] names fell into.
] 
] In early April, a web page was set up at:
] 
] 	http://www.melbourneit.com.au/com_au
] 
] which provided a "license status" check.  Unfortunately,
] it only classes domain names as "licensed" or "unlicensed".

It gives an end date for the license.
(Whether this date is correct is another question.)

For instance :-

	Domain Name iinet.com.au has status UNLICENSED
	Licence valid until 17/3/97

(presumably we should treat 17/3/97 as 30/06/1997?)
as opposed to say :-

	Domain Name melbourneit.com.au has status LICENSED PAID
	Licence valid until 30/10/1999

or :-
	Domain Name [yyy].com.au has status LICENSED
	Licence valid until 31/01/99

or :-
	Domain Name [zzz].com.au has status INVOICED
	Licence valid until 30/10/1999

or :-
	Domain Name no-name.com.au has status UNKNOWN OR INVALID DOMAIN NAME

It's a pity M-IT don't consistently use a date format of DD/MM/YYYY, or
even better (IMHO), the ISO standard for dates: YYYY-MM-DD.

It would also be nice if this query tool was on a separate page (the
DNA home page is more than large enough already) for easy access, and
had some instructions -- for instance, you don't need to include the
".com.au" in your query, and what the possible status values are.
__________________________________________________________________________
David Keegel <djk&#167;cyber.com.au>  http://www.cyber.com.au/  +61 3 9642-5997
Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management