RIPE22 dns-wg minutes - Final version

Folks,

since no more comments were received I here enclose the final version
of the minutes.

----------                                                     ----------
Antonio_Blasco Bonito                          E-Mail: bonito at nis.garr.it
GARR - Network Information Service      c=it;a=garr;p=garr;o=nis;s=bonito
c/o CNUCE - Istituto del CNR                           Tel: +39 50 593246
Via S. Maria, 36                                       Fax: +39 50 904052
I-56126 PISA                                        Telex: 500371 CNUCE I
Italy                   Url: http://www.nis.garr.it/nis/staff/bonito.html
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RIPE 22 DNS Working Group minutes
Amsterdam 12 October 1995

Chairman: Antonio Blasco Bonito (ABB)
Scribe: Benoit Grange (BG)


Participants
------------

Antonio-Blasco Bonito         GARR-NIS                                
Guy Davies                    Unipalm PIPEX                           
Sabine Dolderer               RZ Uni-Karlsruhe, DENIC                 
Oliver Doll                   EUnet Deutschland GmbH                  
Armand Dominque               FCCN/RCCN                               
Francis Dupont                INRIA                                   
Krzysztof Dzwigala            NASK                                    
Benoit Grange                 INRIA / NIC France                      
David Hujer                   SPT TELECOM, A.S.                       
Avgust Jauk                   ARNES                                   
Klaus Landefeld               Nacamar Data Comm.                      
Bohumila Mullerova            CESNET                                  
Ireneusz Neska                NASK                                    
Peder Chr. Norgaard           Telebit Communications A/S
Christian Panigl              UniVie/ACOnet                           
Marc Pichon                   TRANSPAC                                
Franck Pradal                 France Telecom                          
Eva Ptackova                  SPT TELECOM, A.S.                       
Pulak Rakshit                 Cable Online Ltd                        
Nick Reid                     RIPE NCC                                
Valeria Rossi                 CILEA                                   
Oliver Smith                  Demon Internet Ltd                      
Milan Sterba                  HP Czech republic                       
Thierry Scortatore            FRANCE TELECOM                          
Bernard Tuy                   CNRS / UREC                             
Pierre Verbaeten              KU Leuven                               
Eric Wassenaar                NIKHEF                                  
Ton Windgassen                EU.IBM                                  



Preliminaries
-------------

Rob Blokzijl presented the apologies from the working group chairman,
Leonid Yegoshin (LY), who had a visa problem and asked ABB to chair
the group.

The agenda was reorganized and agreed.


1) Reports about DNS Failures
   --------------------------

[This item should have been covered by LY, but because he was not there
some of us reported current problems]

BG talked about the known problem with uncesessary glues that appear in
zone transfers. This happens on most old implementations (BIND prior to
4.9) as shipped my most of the vendors.

DNS Operation suffer from old implementation that have known bugs and proble
ms.

The usual suggestion is to install a recent version of BIND, which
happens to be a beta version. It was noted that, altough that
effectively eliminates the problem, many DNS administrators are not
willing to use a beta version.

  The working group agreed on sending a letter to the ISC to ask to put
  BIND 4.9.3 in final so that doubts about it are solved.

  [ACTION on ABB]

Many expressed concern about how delegation changes are done at the
Internic.

Today Internic accepts any change to current delegation (normal and
reverse) and also to glue records. This leads to situation where some
bad data is introduced, either as an error, or as some malicious
action.

Eg:

'ns.ripe.net' (193.0.0.193) is primary for 'ripe.net' and a lot of
important zones. John Doe wants to create a 'johndoe.com' zone and
submits a request to Internic mentionning both 'banana.johndoe.com'
(198.1.2.3) as primary and 'ns.ripe.net' with a WRONG address
193.0.0.93 because of a typo.

Internic creates the 'johndoe.com' zone and CHANGES the glue record for
'ns.ripe.net'. All delegations to  'ns.ripe.net' are affected because
Internic accepted unnecessary glue record from John Doe and blindly
accepted to change an existing name server IP address.

  The working group recommends that Internic does not accept unneccessary
  glue records and double checks any change to existing glue records.

  [ACTION on Geert Jan de Groot]

Some people do not watch their name servers: it happens that some name
servers are left unattended and fail without anyone noticing. This
has an impact on the performance and reliability of the overall name
service.

People should watch their name servers and their zones on their primary
and secondaries. At least the 'host' command can be used in the
following way: host -C -A -L 1  <zonename> to do this at regular
intervals.

  During the plenary session someone remembered the existance of
  RFC1713 A. Romao, "Tools for DNS debugging", which is usually
  referred to as the guide for DNS administrators and suggested to ask
  the author to include such recommendation.

  [ACTION on ABB]


2) 'in-addr.arpa' automatic checking and delegation (D. Kessens)
   -------------------------------------------------------------

David briefly talked about the tool he wrote which is being used at
RIPE- NCC.  This tools checks if the reverse zone is correctly
configured as per RIPE requirements.

Usage: Send an e-mail message to 'auto-inaddr at ripe.net' containing the
'inet-num' object with 'rev-svr:' attributes listing the desired name
servers (1 name server per line). Send an empty message to get help.

The final editing of the zone file is still done manually and the
operators also checks the author of the update.

  After a short discussion the group agreed that some authentication
  mechanism be added in order to avoid malicious changes to current
  delegation, specially when the reverse delegation process will be
  completly automated.

  [ACTION on RIPE-NCC]

This tool could also be used to check for normal delegations, but only
after some rewriting because some of the checks are specific to reverse
delegation or RIPE requirements.

Sources are on ftp://ftp.ripe.net/tools/inaddrtool-VERSION

Another tool to check delegation exist under http://www.nic.fr/ZoneCheck

  Sources of this tool will be freely available by the end of the year.

  [ACTION on BG]


3) Future developments of the name servers
   ---------------------------------------

It was reported that:

Paul Vixie got RU-BIND and will somehow merge the two programs.

IBM has donated code to do dynamic updates, and an other source is
available as well.


4) About the recent changes of the root name servers
   -------------------------------------------------

All root name servers have been renamed as
'<letter>.root-servers.net'.

If you want to know the "old name" of a name server, query for the TXT
record associated with the name.

A new primary for the root zone will be created and managed directly
from IANA, and the primary for the '.com', etc. zones will remain
managed by Internic.


5) Charging for domain names, etc.
   -------------------------------

TLD administrators are increasingly contacted by multinational company
which wants to create a bunch of domains in different countries.
Different countries have different policies and procedures. The
requestor often challenge the TLD aministrator with questions about
differences in naming and registration policies.

A European TLD forum might be useful to have a better understanding of
the matter.  The first move should be to collect how TLD management is
done over Europe. As a starting point the working group decided to set
up a questionnaire.

The main reason to collect such information is to help the TLD
administrators in their task by knowing the guidelines followed by
other countries. If they wish TLD administrators have then the
possibility to keep themselves aligned to the mean behaviour (best
current practice?), to reduce disputes about registration requests.

  During the meeting Guy Davies (GD) started collecting a lot of
  proposed questions. He will organise the questionnaire and submit it
  to the list for review and later send it to the European TLD admins.

  [Action on GD]

DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT