Draft minutes of ripe22-dnswg

Better late than never...

Here are the drafts minutes scribed by Benoit Grange and edited by me.

Please send corrections/additions to the list before 951110.

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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)

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 with the '-C'
option 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.
   -------------------------------

A European 'TLD' forum might be useful, and the first move should be to
collect how TLD management is done over Europe. Different countries
have different policies, etc.

Some multinational company which wants to create a bunch of domains in
different countries needs more information on how this can be done
and who should be contacted.

  The working group decided to set up a questionnaire and Guy Davies
  (GD) collected a lot of 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]

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