[dns-wg] Secondary service on ns.ripe.net for reverse delegations.

At 3:13 PM +0200 6/4/07, Brett Carr wrote:
>As there was very little response to Jim's posting I am replying (hoping to

Okay, so if it's discussion you want...

>On May 14, 2007, at 12:25 PM, Jim Reid wrote:

>>  * Is there value in having the NCC provide DNS service for big/important
>>  reverse zones?

This isn't the question I would ask.  It's not a matter if 
yet-another-well-managed slave is a good thing or not (obviously 
yes), it's a matter if the expense incurred to do this worth it.

There's the basic cost benefit question, to which I suspect the 
answer would be "it's worth it."  Then there's the opportunity 
question of whether the budget of the RIPE NCC is better spent 
elsewhere.  And then there's the question if whether not doing so 
permits miscreant children for doing bad things.

>>  * If the answer to the above question is yes, under what conditions? ie What
>>  do we mean by big or important?

I think the answer is yes, so long as Brett Carr hasn't gone insane 
and moved all of the servers to an X.25 network.  Big or important - 
big is anything over 12 units of any measure and important is "if I 
use it."

>>  * If the answer is still yes, should this service be compulsory or
>>  optional? And under what conditions would optional use become compulsory
>>  and vice versa?

This comes down to the question of how much responsibility does a 
registry/parent zone assume for its child delegations.  In the domain 
name world, there is little need for the parent to enforce proper 
operation by the child (in terms of preventing protocol failures, I'm 
not including "fast flux" issues).  However in the reverse map world, 
I'm not as sure of an answer.

What is the experience of having an ISP that fails to maintain their 
reverse map delegation by customers that want to have their reverse 
map data available?  I.e., once I wanted to have the reverse map for 
my new v6 (PA) subnet running, but our provider didn't have reverse 
map service for v6.

>>  * If the answer to the orginal question is no, what, if anything, does the
>>  NCC do about things like lame delegations for reverse zones and the
>>  operational problems these cause the NCC?

There are two questions here.

Do lame delegations cause problems and what should the RIPE NCC do about it?

5 years ago, there was software that behaved badly in a big way when 
there was a lame delegation.  I don't know if that software is still 
a problem.  Given the experience of lame delegation work I have done, 
it seems like the problem has mostly "just gone away."

Do lame delegations cause operational problems for the RIPE NCC?

The only thing I would suspect is an elevated query rate for stuff 
that belongs to lame servers.  I suspect that that could be measured 
if we wanted.

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Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

Sarcasm doesn't scale.