[mat-wg] RIPE Atlas DNS status checks

On 2014.03.20. 9:49, Robert Kisteleki wrote:
> On 2014.03.19. 12:02, Brett Carr wrote:
>>> 2. An ability to provide sms/e-mail alerting depending on certain (user
>>> definable) conditions.
>>
>> To be slightly more specific, 
>>
>> https://labs.ripe.net/Members/suzanne_taylor_muzzin/introducing-ripe-atlas-status-checks
>>
>> Something more DNS specific but similar to the above would be very useful.
> 
> This is entirely possible. In order to implement it, we'd like to keep the
> mechanism described in the article, but extend it to support DNS. Still,
> because determining success/failure of DNS measurements is a bit more tricky
> than pings, the details need some discussion. I invite all to have that
> discussion on the MAT-WG mailing list (also on cc now).

As a conversation starter: what would you expect from these DNS checks?

Some ideas / questions:
* the generic framework will be the same (pull model, options specified in
the URL, answer method still applies, ...)
* checking RTT probably does not make that much sense for DNS, can we ignore
that and do some combination of the ones below instead?
* always treat "unable to connect" or "no answer" as an error condition (per
probe)?
* option for treating any response except "NOERROR" as an error condition
(per probe)?
* is there a need for comparing the results to an expected "known good"
value? note that this is somewhat difficult in cases of random A/AAAA order.
Maybe do this for SOA (serial) only?

Please chime in if you're a DNS guy interested in how we could help you.
(And I'd like to recommend reading the article and the status check API
documentation first.)

Regards,
Robert