Re: The SRS and Lame Delegations

On Monday, March 18, 2002, at 08:26 , Brian Gibbons wrote:

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From: "Andy Linton" I'd like to see the registry operate on the principle that the names registered are listed in both the registry's database and the DNS

Agree in principle.

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This implies that the nameservers should be operational and checked at the time of resistration.

Disagree

Assuming Registrar/Registry are NZ based and the Name Server provider is US based.

There is also the principle that the less the registry has to do, the less they are likely to mess it up. Adding a requirement for delegation checks performed by the registry: + requires registry support for delegation checks + requires registry/registrar support for additional nodes in the state machine graph + imposes an additional support burden on the registry and registrar One thing I have noticed through my attempts to enumerate local nets on maggie.automagic.org is that many networks in NZ are *extremely leaky*. Route policy is not consistently applied, and there is lots of noise. Transient (and not-so-transient) routing loops abound. It is entirely possible that a nameserver might be visible and responding correctly to large chunks of NZ but not to the registry for a substantial time (I have seem similar situations recently which took days to resolve). People frequently aren't very good at running nameservers. Lame delegations come and go with the phases of the moon, and just because a domain is delegated correctly at registration time doesn't mean it's going to stay that way. For a registrar that also provides nameservice (quite possibly most of them), the delegation checks impose additional complexity to the provisioning process. Domains have to be loaded and brought live on the authoritative nameservers before registration can complete, and this realistically means that no registrar will be able to provide real-time registration. To me, these add up to a non-trivial number of downsides, for only one marginal upside (that nameservers might be briefly well-configured at registration time). The only reason I can think of to impose delegation checks at any stage is to reduce the size of the second-level zone files, and if the zone files were big that might be a good reason to do it. If that was the aim, something like Peter's suggestion for removing entries for domains which exhibit consistently lame delegations would seem to be more effective than the registration-time check. Joe - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog