New draft charter for the RIPE DNS WG

At 2:14 AM -0700 2002/07/11, Jim Reid wrote:

>  Yes, absolutely. These are clearly things that will be of interest to
>  the WG membership and the DNS community as a whole. Do you feel
>  there's nothing in the revised charter which addresses your points? If
>  not, please suggest some text we could add or at least discuss.

	Well, what about having the RIPE NCC actually using DNS debugging 
tools like doc, dnswalk, etc... to monitor domains served by RIPE 
(including reverse delegations), and making this information publicly 
available (or at least available to RIPE members)?

>  Your question of sponsorship is a good one. But there's a problem
>  about how the term is defined. If you mean sponsor in the the sense of
>  encourage or nurture, then I would say yes, that's definitely
>  something the WG can and should do.

	I was thinking about some of the kinds of tools that the NetNews 
WG has developed (e.g., flow maps, nhns, etc...), or the Tools WG, or 
the Test Traffic WG.

>                                      If you mean hand over money, I'd
>  have to uhm and ahh.

	I'd have to talk to my employers, but I might be able to get them 
to donate some of my time to work on things like this, if there was 
some sort of "official" sponsorship from RIPE or RIPE NCC, with 
official recognition, etc....

	Absolutely no guarantees, of course.  But they might just go for 
it, if they got something in return, especially if that might 
potentially lead to future consulting work.

>                       The WG has no money or budget and I'd be
>  pleasantly surprised if the members would be willing to put their
>  hands in their pockets.

	Actually being paid money for the work would also help.  ;-)

>  One thing I would ask people on this list to do is give more feedback
>  and suggestions on what the WG should and should not do.

	Despite other comments I have made, I believe that the WG should 
first focus on things like determining what the current best practice 
is, and then documenting and advocating that.  This would be with 
regard to DNS Operations, DNS Policy, etc....

	However, I also believe that the DNS WG should work with the RIPE 
NCC to help implement these best practices, at least insofar as RIPE 
and the RIPE NCC has influence or the ability to do so.  This would 
also include the development or sponsoring the development of tools 
to help implement these best practices.


	In other words, I take a rather activist view.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.