[ncc-services-wg] dnsmon - why?

On 05.09 10:09, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
> Continuing in my previous view of examining RIPE services and alternatives 
> that are available:
> 
> At the RIPE meeting, I saw http://dnsmon.ripe.net.
> 
> How is this different than:
> http://www.caida.org/cgi-bin/dns_perf/main.pl
> and
> http://www.cymru.com/DNS/dns.html
> 
> Wouldn't it make sense to use these services to monitor country roots 
> rather than create yet another new RIPE service?

Hank,

work on this started when we needed real data about the service quality
of k.root-servers.net as seen from the users, e.g.  from *a lot of*
places.  This was done as part of the RIPE NCC's responsibility to
operate that server.  Once we did it for one server the incremental work
to do it for the other root servers as well was very small.  We wanted
to compare our service levels ;-).  This was intended for the use by the
k.root-servers.net operators, and other root name server operators. 

But why should we keep this data to ourselves?  So we published it as
alpha.  Soon lots of people found it cool and suggested to monitor TLDs
as well and again the additional effort involved was not very high.  I
immediately thought that it would very fair if tose responsible for the
ccTLDs would contribute to the operating costs once this becomes a
service.  It turns out that a number of the European ccTLDs were not
only prepared to pay a fair share but eager.  So I expect that this will
happen.  

This also sparked and influenced my thinking about measurements
in general which I wrote up in ripe-271.  This memo also explains why I
think the RIPE NCC should do measurement and data collection activities,
so I will not repeat it here. 

Henk might expand with more details.

Daniel