clueing in TLD registries for delegations to non-BIND servers

>>>>> "Stefan" == Stefan Paletta <stefanp at cabal1.com> writes:

    Stefan> All, good to see nsd make progress (played with it a litte
    Stefan> while ago, but tinydns continues to serve me best).

Oh dear. It seems that the behaviour of tinydns is preventing you from
registering domains in some TLDs. That wouldn't appear to be "serving
you best", at least not to me anyway.

    Stefan> Some TLD registries, however, make unreasonable demands
    Stefan> regarding the behaviour of servers to which they delegate
    Stefan> zones. Most notably the .fr and .it registries, which
    Stefan> apparently demand that servers return a
    Stefan> (non-authoritative!, in the case of .it) referral to the
    Stefan> root servers when they are lame.  These demands are highly
    Stefan> questionable -to say the least- and are hard and sometimes
    Stefan> impossible to follow for users of at least tinydns and
    Stefan> nsd.

While I am not speaking on behalf of these registries -- they can do
that themselves -- I believe they're acting out of enlightened
self-interest. Many people think a registration entitles them to hours
of free consultancy from the registry on how to set up and configure
their name servers. [I have been in several registries and overheard
the helpdesk staff answer floods of these calls.] Expecting a customer
to have name servers that answer authoritatively and/or know about the
root servers goes a long way to reducing the number of these
misdirected requests for help. "Don't come to us until your name
servers are working" is not an unreasonable stance IMO.

    Stefan> I was wondering if RIPE or a group from the RIPE community
    Stefan> might appeal to those registries and try to make them stop
    Stefan> acting stupid.

First or all, you do not do your cause any good by spreading insults.
This is not constructive or helpful.

Secondly, you should be aware that it's not for RIPE or the DNS WG to
dictate policy to a ccTLD registry -- that's a national matter -- or
tell anyone how to run their name servers. How an organisation chooses
to operate its infrastructure is up to them. The WG can produce
recommendations or a best common practice (eg RIPE-192) but that's
it. People are free to accept or reject or ignore that advice as they
see fit.

If you wish to prepare such a recommendation, go ahead. The matter can
be discussed on this list and I'll be happy to arrange discussion time
for the subject at future sessions of the WG. As WG chair, I would
welcome a wider analysis of the registration policies of the TLD
registries in the RIPE region (and beyond?) and try to see if some
common guidelines can be established. This could be a worthwhile
subject for a WG recommendation. The topic has exercised you, so I
think you'd be an ideal candidate to get that work under way. :-)

And if I can be provocative, why don't you ask the author of djbdns to
make the software do the Right Thing and at least *respond* whenever
it gets a query for something it's not authoritative for?