- NZNOG - lists.nznog.org

The New Zealand Network Operators' Group
by Donald Neal 07 Nov '99

07 Nov '99

The New Zealand Network Operators' Group The New Zealand Network Operators' Group (NZNOG) has neither a king, a president nor a formal membership. At present it consists of the subscribers to this mailing list, which anyone is free to join. (At last count the list had a little over one 110 subscribers, with the count growing slightly each month.) The NZNOG mailing list is provided through a server at The University of Waikato, and is administered by an employee of Telecom NZ Ltd. Neither of these organisations (nor the administrator) is responsible for its content. NZNOG Mailing List Acceptable Use Policy The NZNOG mailing list exists to provide a forum for the exchange of technical information and the discussion of implementation issues that require cooperation among New Zealand network service providers. In order to continue to provide a useful forum for discussion of relevant technical issues, users of the list are asked to respect the following guidelines. 1. Discussion will focus on Internet operational and technical issues. 2. Discussion related to meetings of network service providers is appropriate. 3. Discussion unrelated to these topics is not appropriate. 4. Postings to multiple mailing lists are discouraged. 5. Postings that include foul language, character assassination, and lack of respect for other participants are unacceptable. 6. Blatant product or service marketing is unacceptable. 7. Postings of a political, philosophical or legal nature are discouraged. 8. Postings to the list should be in ASCII or MIME encoded as text/plain. Attachments should not be sent to the list. To present a document, a suitable URL may be referred to. For documents of general interest, the use of proprietary file formats is discouraged. 9. Breaches of list etiquette should be dealt with privately with the offending list user, and should not result in complaints being sent to the list. Mailing List Archives A full archive is available at http://list.waikato.ac.nz/archives/nznog/ To search the archive, see http://list.waikato.ac.nz/archives/search.html (and remember to select nznog). Subscribing to the List To subscribe to the NZNOG list, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz, where the body of the message reads subscribe nznog There are at present no restrictions on who may subscribe to the list, or even on who may post to the list. Digest Mailing List If you don't wish to receive postings as they are sent, you can instead subscribe to the nznog-digest mailiing list, on which all postings are sent out in a single "digest" every couple of days. Other Activities NZNOG does not at present have other regular activities than this mailing list, though some Auckland subscribers have been known to meet over beer. Donald Neal NZNOG Mailing List Owner/Administrator/Muggins -- Donald Neal | HTTP is everywhere. It could not be so Service Platforms | pervasive without being good. Centralised Maintain and Support | Therefore, HTTP is good. Telecom NZ Ltd | - RFC2324 --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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Connections to APE (plus changes)
by Richard Naylor 01 Nov '99

01 Nov '99

In the next week or so the 2 switches at APE will be replaced with a more capable Cisco switch, through the generosity of Cisco NZ. While this is taking place there will be a smal outage on the APE switch. Users will notice an outage of less than 1 minute while the new switch learns mac addresses etc. At the same time, cablers will be on site and available to connect up any parties interested in joining the exchange. Prospective users whose external connectivity has yet to arrive, can still be connected while the cabling is taking place - its easier for the installers to pull a bundle at one time. If you are interested in having cable put in place for a future connection, please contact me in the next week. thanks - rich richard.naylor(a)citylink.co.nz This mail message contains information that is confidential and which may be subject to legal privilege. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, distribute or copy this message. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and erase this mail. --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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web page with APE stuff on it
by Joe Abley 01 Nov '99

01 Nov '99

I thought it might be good to have some info about APE on a web page somewhere. So I threw this together: http://www.patho.gen.nz/ape/ It almost certainly contains at least _some_ lies; please let me know what they are (or, if you don't care, I'll just carry on spreading them :) Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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WHOIS/Zone Transfer Policy
by John Vorstermans 26 Oct '99

26 Oct '99

Hi. The revised draft of the WHOIS and Zone Transfer policies are now available at: http://www.isocnz.org.nz/whoisdraft231099.html http://www.isocnz.org.nz/zfdraft231099.html Any comment or feedback are welcome. The earlier drafts are still available at: http://www.isocnz.org.nz/zfdraft1099.html http://www.isocnz.org.nz/whoisdraft1099.html Regards John Vorstermans Technical Committee ISOCNZ -- John Vorstermans || We are what we repeatedly do. Technical Manager || - Aristotle Actrix Networks --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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rata.vuw.ac.nz outage
by Richard Stevenson 23 Oct '99

23 Oct '99

Hi all I figured that you may all want to know that rata.vuw.ac.nz, one of the secondary nameservers for the nz ccTLD, will be out of service for an undetermined period of time tomorrow evening (Saturday 23 October 1999). As part of our Y2K preparations, management here has decided that all of our core systems should be shut down, powered off, left to cool, and then restarted, to see what breaks. This will all happen tomorrow night. The shutdown and startup procedures will be carried out by unqualified staff (i.e. not even Unix-literate) as an experiment in system documentation standards. I hope to see you all on the other side. Regards Richard ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Richard Stevenson Systems Engineer, Information Technology Services Victoria University of Wellington Phone: +64 4 4635051 Fax: +64 4 4635552 Being a Unix system administrator is like being a tech in a biological warfare laboratory, except that none of the substances are labeled consistently, any of the compounds are just as likely to kill you by themselves as they are when mixed with one another, and it is never clear what distinction is made between a catastrophic failure in the lab and a successful test in the field. (--M. Tiemann) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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Re: rata.vuw.ac.nz outage
by Mark Davies 21 Oct '99

21 Oct '99

From: Joe Abley <jabley(a)patho.gen.nz> Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 16:41:35 +1300 > Nice to have some warning on this. However, 24 hours is a little > slim for an event that will take out 1/6 of all recursive lookups > on nz names "for an undetermined period", isn't it? Well I would have given you more warning but when I first heard they were going to do this and queried it I misread the answer they gave me to say that rata wouldn't be included so Richards message was a little surprise to me as well. Rata is intended to be the last machine down and the first up so hopefully the disruption should be quite short. mark --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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RE: [ISOCNZ-L] Re: zdraft1099.html (DRAFT ISOCNZ Zone Transfer P
by Mark Harris 18 Oct '99

18 Oct '99

Joe, Not to steal his thunder, but John V. has indicated to the Council that he had received some good feedback from the lists and email which is going to require a redraft of both policies to include some of the suggestions and rewordings. He also said that the Technical Committee is meeting later this week to consider these changes and he hopes to have something final after that. We don't want this to go on forever, so I imagine RSN :-) Cheers Mark > -----Original Message----- > From: Joe Abley [SMTP:jabley(a)patho.gen.nz] > Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 1999 9:44 AM > To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz; isocnz-l(a)isocnz.org.nz > Subject: Re: [ISOCNZ-L] Re: zdraft1099.html (DRAFT ISOCNZ Zone > Transfer P > > It seems that a reasonable amount of feedback has been provided now... > When can we expect revised draft policies to be made available? > > > Joe > > - > To subscribe/unsubscribe to the isocnz-l mailing list send a message > to majordomo(a)isocnz.org.nz with the keyword subscribe or unsubscribe > as the message plus the list name i.e. unsubscribe isocnz-l --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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zdraft1099.html (DRAFT ISOCNZ Zone Transfer Policy)
by Joe Abley 18 Oct '99

18 Oct '99

John, Some feedback for you. Background A primary name server is a name server that gets the data for its zones from local files. Changes to a zone, such as adding domains or hosts, are done at the Primary Name Server. A secondary name server gets the data for its zones from another name server across the network which is authoritative for that zone. The processes of obtaining this zone information (that is the database file) across the network is referred to as a zone transfer. Since bind 8 I believe the nomenclature that has been widely adopted is a "master" nameserver (corresponding to a master zone configured on that host) and multiple "slave" nameservers which keep their copies of the zone up-to-date using zone transfers. Probably makes sense to make use of the current terminology. Zone Transfers will be allowed provided: [...] I think that there are numerous reasons to perform a zone transfer which are not covered here, which would be consistent with the privacy act provision in point 2. It seems to me that the list is unnecessarily restrictive in presuming to know all the reasons an operator might have for performing a zone transfer. I also think that there is nothing wrong with statistics gathering. Understanding trends makes the network a safer place. I do not understand your earlier point that data for statistical analysis would be available on the web, but not by zone transfer... Perhaps I misunderstood it. I would rephrase point (3) to be something like: that it is not for the purpose of allowing, enabling or otherwise supporting the transmission of mass unsolicitited, commercial advertising or solicitatious e-mail. I would also make point (4) a little more general, and allow zone transfers to facilitate "operational network engineering". Is it reasonable for a request not to contain a detailed description of the reason for wanting to perform a zone transfer? What is a reasonable request? Is the idea of this policy to be prepared in the event that a flagrant misuse of the zone data occurs? If so, I think it's a good idea. If the idea is to implement an immediate set of restrictions on zone transfers, and to administer zone transfer access control (including all associated adds, moves and changes) for all secondary nameservers, then I remain slightly dubious :) Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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Draft WHOIS and Zone Transfer Policies
by John Vorstermans 16 Oct '99

16 Oct '99

Greetings. The ISOCNZ Technical Committee has prepared two draft policies. 1. Directing Domainz to implement a WHOIS server. http://www.isocnz.org.nz/whoisdraft1099.html 2. A policy on Zone Transfers. http://www.isocnz.org.nz/zfdraft1099.html I hope to be able to ask the council to vote on these next week. Any comments or submissions to these draft proposals would of course be most welcome. If you wish to make a submission please email to john(a)actrix.co.nz These drafts have also been sent to the ISOCNZ members mailing list for comment. Regards John -- John Vorstermans || We are what we repeatedly do. Technical Manager || - Aristotle Actrix Networks --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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Re: whoisdraft1099.html (DRAFT WHOIS SERVER POLICY)
by Joe Abley 15 Oct '99

15 Oct '99

John, More feedback, different draft. An WHOIS server is the Internet Standard way of access details from, in our case, the .nz database. "a" whois server, surely :) * It is a separate service. Separate from what? * It is currently provided by all major Name Service organisations, e.g. Ripe and APNIC etc. RIPE and APNIC aren't actually name service organisations; they're regional registries for ASN and IP number allocations. You might use CRSNIC, NSI, Nominet, etc if you're looking for examples of registries' and registrars' use of whois. WHOIS Policy * That NZIRL be required to put in place a standard WHOIS server on the .nz database. What needs to be carefully specified is the formatting of queries and responses to the whois service. There are a number of different "standard" query definitions and response formats currently in use amongst different registries. It would make sense for Domainz/ISOCNZ to approach the heavier users of their existing services and consult as to the query and response formats that are required. The Data in ISOCNZ WHOIS database is provided by NZIRL for information purposes, and to assist persons in obtaining information about or related to a domain name registration record. NZIRL does not guarantee its accuracy. NIRL should guarantee that the response returned to a query is consistent with the data stored by Domainz at the time of the query. (2) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that apply to NZIRL (or its systems). I'm not sure what this means. What does it mean? ISOCNZ reserves the right to modify these terms at any time. I would imagine that you should qualify this by specifying how changes to the policy will be notified to users of the whois service. You might also refer to RFC812, which specifies nicname/whois. It's a little old (it refers to NCP/TCP!) but the core protocol is described there, such as it is. Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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