- dns-wg - mailman.ripe.net

Jumping the gun on SIDN!
by Pim van Pelt 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

Hi, With some relief and pride, I'd like to show you that the dutch registry SIDN has enabled their registrars to offer IPv6 glue. One can send in a request using a freeform ticket. I happen to have been the first, so since todays serial of 200410280, there are new records in the nl. zone. Yaay! ; <<>> DiG 9.3.0 <<>> @ns.domain-registry.nl NS bit.nl. ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 1989 ;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 6 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;bit.nl. IN NS ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: bit.nl. 86400 IN NS nsauth1.bit.nl. bit.nl. 86400 IN NS nsauth2.bit.nl. bit.nl. 86400 IN NS nsauth3.bit.nl. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: nsauth1.bit.nl. 86400 IN A 213.136.12.51 nsauth2.bit.nl. 86400 IN A 213.136.12.59 nsauth3.bit.nl. 86400 IN A 212.204.192.11 nsauth1.bit.nl. 86400 IN AAAA 2001:7b8:3:2c::53 nsauth2.bit.nl. 86400 IN AAAA 2001:7b8:3:2d::53 nsauth3.bit.nl. 86400 IN AAAA 2001:898:1001:1003::53 ;; Query time: 46 msec ;; SERVER: 193.176.144.2#53(ns.domain-registry.nl) ;; WHEN: Thu Oct 28 13:04:59 2004 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 222 The dutch registry will implement and enable IPv6 in their infrastructure also, so I'm told by SIDN. -- Met vriendelijke groet, BIT BV / Ing P.B. van Pelt PBVP1-RIPE (PGPKEY-4DCA7E5E)

2 1

Re: [dns-wg] Re: ORSN-SERVERS.NET
by JFC (Jefsey) Morfin 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

At 21:57 24/10/2004, Jay Daley wrote: >Markus >Markus wrote on 22/10/2004 12:26:13 pm: > > > We are only the > > european (independent) copy of the stable ICANN root server system :-)) > >I really do not understand this. How are you in anyway more independent >than k-root or i-root? Jay, I will try to review this key point for the internet development. what ORSN does is risk containment. Suppose the ICANN/NTIA root is hacked. The ORSN file is not affected. This provides a protection. Now, obviously, if the delay in updating the ORSN file is too long it is going to pollute the namespace with old data. This is why trouble shouting calls for a report on possible differences. Such report must be taken both ways: - a way to know that ORSN is outdated - an alarm that the ICANN/NTIA root may be hacked. This kind of issue has been identified by the dot-root project of a DNS test bed we carried last years. This has lead us to work on local roots concepts and eventually on the authoritative root matrix (which is not documented, but implemented in reality through the additional name servers entered in the top level through ccTLD db.files for example). This also lead to the AFRAC project (http://afrac.org) to unlock root files (like the ICANN/NTIA root file) as this is true for any other application root file, through contextual root files for what we named "externets" (ie an external global view of the internet). For example, a Japanese externet can be all the users and hosts which freely chose to belong to it. End to end relations may then be limited to these externet members (only people able to read Japanese). You can belong to many externets. In the case of a nation, we identified that a national externet is a regalian duty. What does that mean? It means that many things may happen which affect your sure national use of the DNS. In 99.99% of the case that you use an US, a French, an European or a East-Timor root server is the same. But in critical occasions you will want to use a nameserver which will follow the rules which protect your skin. We developed this kind of thinking in parallel to the White House - we proposed ICANN to work on an "ICP-4" document on netsecurity in December 2001 at the DNSO/BC with a few large operators and corporations,. We then introduced the dot-root project to work on this along the lines of the ICP-3 document which investigates the possible end of an authoritative file and defines the conditions for test bedding we stick to [we added a few]). The White House (Dick Clarke) worked along the same lines after 9/11 and came with a very powerful evaluation showing that the internet represented a nuclear equivalent risk to the USA through the vulnerability of critical infrastructures and the impact on the US economy and way of life of a major dysfunction. We could measure it through the impact of the East Coast Black Out - should it have happened in Feb blizzard, the impact would have been devastating. This eventually lead to the http://whitehouse.gov/pcipb national strategy, the first visible impact we all know is the DoD IPv6 commitment. Let imagine that a terrorist atomic bomb blows Washington-West (the top worldwide target and an US working hypothesis). The propagation through the internet would be times devastating than the bomb itself on the USA. Regalian US duty will be to reserve most of the remaining internet bandwidth to civil security information and economy protection. P2P, adult, etc. traffic will not be a priority. The DNS is the control tool. We do not want to suffer from that in Europe or in the rest of the world, because there is no reason and because it would propagate the terror (and make the attempt more attractive and therefore more likely). So an European regalian duty is DNS risk containment, to protect us from the results of an attack of the US and to protect the US from being attacked. This is a very common strategy in network security. This means that every Gov has a regalian duty, not to load the ICANN/NTIA file, but to copy it like ORSN does. This copying must be carried with a take-over procedure to cope with a special national situation. A critical problem may be local. Or there may be an external attack. Let for example consider the Iraq invasion and the ".iq" management. The USA attacked ".iq" through spam DoS and lead Iraq to stop all their servers. An Iraqi externet would have made the Iraqi machine to switch to the Iraqi root they could have build the way they wanted (this same externet reasoning applies to IPv6 addresses and national numbering zones we support and document for years and the ITU now openly investigates - please remember that ITU is not an "internet opponent" but the Rep of regalian concerns). A very common hypothesis is a "Tchernobyl" like incident. TV waves pollution will make ADSL screens the best way to inform and calm the people through stable screams, with a major user demand peak. The control of the DNS would be vital. Another interesting point is that published reports are that only 2.5% of the root calls are legitimate, addressing based externets are a way to protect users at peak critical times. Their support in IPv6 numbering plan is a regalian demand that we should see develop in the coming months. It is also a network security issue to avoid pollution of the DNS in such cases. Obviously this is not the only resulting user architectural changes implied by the ICANN ICP-3 and WSIS real world consequences, as some mails documented it about DNS database usages. jfc morfin

6 5

Re: [dns-wg] Re: ORSN-SERVERS.NET
by Jim Reid 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

>>>>> "JFC" == JFC (Jefsey) Morfin <jefsey(a)jefsey.com> writes: JFC> what ORSN does is risk containment. Suppose the ICANN/NTIA JFC> root is hacked. The ORSN file is not affected. This provides JFC> a protection. Could I please have some of whatever drugs you're taking? :-) IIUC this ORSN nonsense uses the root zone file as a starting point. So presumably any errors that get introduced there will be passed on to ORSN and its fellow travellers, no? JFC> Let imagine that a terrorist atomic bomb blows JFC> Washington-West (the top worldwide target and an US working JFC> hypothesis). The propagation through the internet would be JFC> times devastating than the bomb itself on the USA. First of all, I think most people would accept that any loss of life is far, far more devastating than the ability to route packets and make DNS lookups. Secondly, the root zone doesn't change much: TLDs renumber one of their servers now and again. Even if a major catastrophe destroyed the ability to change the root zone for a while -- I very much doubt that -- this would at worst be a minor inconvenience for TLD operators and the DNS in general. Good TLD managements will keep the old name servers running for at least a month or two after a renumbering. In fact a strong case can be made for NOT changing the root zone after such an event for stability reasons. Finally, suppose Something Bad has happened and the root can't be changed. Why would a TLD then choose to update their info in this bogus ORSN root while the info in the real root was unchanged? Wouldn't that lead to precisely the sort of inconsistency and network partitioning that the ORSN people claim they want to avoid?

2 1

Analysis of NSD
by Jim Reid 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

>>>>> "Stephane" == Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer(a)nic.fr> writes: >> Well, for NSD, using large zones will cause it to eat memory >> exponentially. Stephane> Here is the NSD maintainer's analysis: Stephane> http://open.nlnetlabs.nl/pipermail/nsd-users/2004-October/000276.html While there is no reason to dispute the analysis from NSD's authors, I do think it would be nice if there was an independent analysis of NSD. And other DNS implementations for that matter. The work Brad did a couple of years ago was a step in that direction. I would also encourage operators to share their experiences of different name server implementations here: performance, protocol compliance, features, management & support issues, SLAs with hosting providers, etc, etc. Capturing and documenting this anecdotal information would be very useful.

5 9

Re: [dns-wg] Re: Elimination of 2nd level ccTLD domain names
by Piet Beertema 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

> > I think that's the scale of problem that is facing us with a flat > > .eu zone, and far more rapidly than anyone here is giving credit. > >my impression is we're about to enter an infinite loop. That in fact is the case already. >While still you might be right, we would now have to discuss growth >rates based on market potential etc. Now you hit upon an interesting issue. In NL we were more or less forced a couple of years ago to open up registration for private persons too, the reasoning behind it being 'fixed' e-mail addresses even when people moved to another ISP, which happened frequently. Initially we 'solved' this by introducing numeric SLD's (123.nl), under which they could register names. That was not a success, to put it mildly: all in all we registered less than 1000 domains of that kind. Main reason: people didn't like the numeric "extension". More recently .NL itself was opened up for private persons too, but now we see a vastly different situation from a couple of years ago: because of the massive amounts of spam 'fixed' addresses are not en vogue anymore and lots of people have loads of addresses. Which is just one reason why I don't expect TLD's to explode and a good example of a problem that solves itself. Piet

2 1

NOTIFY
by Jim Reid 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

>>>>> "Johan" == =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Johan Ihr=E9n?= <ISO-8859-1> writes: Johan> i.e. that way you compromise synchronicity (is Johan> there such a word?) There is. It means to agree in time or to have the property of agreeing in time. The extract from Wikipedia is appropriate: For the album by The Police see Synchronicity. Synchronicity is a term that was used by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe the alignment of universal forces with one's own life experience. Jung believed that some (if not all) coincidences were not mere chance, but instead a literal "co-inciding", or alignment of forces in the universe to create an event or circumstance. For most of the people here, I suppose their life experiences are aligned with the universal, not mere chance forces of consistent DNS data. :-) Johan> PS. I choose the word synchronicity rather than coherence, Johan> because as long as each slave publish exactly the same data Johan> for the same SOA serial they are technically coherent (to Johan> the version of the data they *have*) although they may be Johan> temporarily out of sync (with slaves having acquiered more Johan> recent data). Hmmm. Your suggestion of synchronicity works given the definition above. However I would have called that coherence: two or more servers publishing identical data for a given SOA serial. The name servers would be consistent if they all had the same data and SOA serial. But consistency usually has another meaning in the DNS: the same query always gets the same answer no matter where the query is made from. So perhaps strict consistency could mean when all authoritative servers have identical data for some zone. It doesn't really matter what terminology we use. Just as long as we agree on its meaning. "When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean." The quote's from Alice in Wonderland I think.

1 0

NOTIFY
by Jim Reid 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Koch <pk(a)TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE> writes: >> As it happens we use probing not NOTIFY since it gives a >> greater level of control over the number of secondaries being >> updated at once (and the Peter> NOTIFY already specifies precautions against a 'rush', Peter> although implementations may differ and depending on the Peter> size of the zone 'at once' may have different meanings. Yes. But BIND's implementation of this feature is meant for the case when there are lots of zones that get changed and reloaded. [And there are no control hooks for setting the delay interval IIRC.] The server staggers the sending of NOTIFYs to reduce the potential for an axfr storm. The feature doesn't really help when there's a huge zone. Like co.uk... >> bandwidth) and the order in which they are updated. This does >> rely on strict calculations of the timings of changes and >> probes but that is fairly easy to do. Peter> How about sending the NOTIFY messages out of band instead Peter> of relying upon retry (and not refresh?)? There's a little Peter> 'DoS' potential, though. How about rndc refresh or rndc retransfer in 9.3? It's not really an out of band NOTIFY, though the effect is the same. Note the new Subject since this thread isn't talking abouut an analysis of NSD any more.

1 0

Elimination of 2nd level ccTLD domain names
by Hank Nussbacher 27 Oct '04

27 Oct '04

I'm new to this particular WG but I'd like to raise an issue that I feel is best discussed in a European DNS forum. It has to do with .eu: <http://europa.eu.int/information_society/newsroom/cf/itemlongdetail.cfm?ite…> According to my understanding, there will be direct 2nd level domains - like ibm.eu or ripe.eu or even tonyblair.eu. Up till now, most countries employed a hierarchical structure such as ac.xx or co.xx or org.xx. What do we lose by eliminating 2nd level domains? Since .eu is a totally new TLD - perhaps not much, but what happens to countries that then decide to follow the same path as Singapore recently did (they are cc'ed to this email): http://www.nic.net.sg/newsroom/20040816030345.html Are there any limitations to what a 2nd level domain name can be (not referring to trademarks)? I.e. would a single digit or letter be allowed? Would co.sg be allowed (up till now com.sg was the main commercial 2nd level domain)? Are other countries considering following the same path? Thanks, Hank

14 29

name servers with database back-ends
by Jim Reid 27 Oct '04

27 Oct '04

>>>>> "Jaap" == Jaap Akkerhuis <jaap(a)NLnetLabs.nl> writes: Jaap> The drawback of using a direct database back-end is that Jaap> this means that are close ties between the nameserver and Jaap> the database. If one of the two fails, you have a problem. Indeed. The database back-end becomes a SPoF. To some extent that can be mitigated by the fancy high-availability replication techniques that the likes of Oracle & Sybase offer. For a fancy price of course. Since SPoFs in the DNS are bad, I would hope important zones ran on homogeneous DNS implementations with identical hardware, OS and system administration. So if a TLD did use a name server with a database back-end, I hope they'd couple that with something like dynamic updates to a DNS hosting provider that ran a different implementation. And maybe did anycasting as well. I compare loading Gb-sized text zone files to teaching an elephant to ballet dance. It can be made to work if sufficient energy is expended though the results are not pretty.

1 1

Re: [dns-wg] Announcement: "DNSSEC HOWTO"
by Jim Reid 27 Oct '04

27 Oct '04

Olaf, thanks very much to you and your colleagues for producing this. I wonder if it would be appropriate to have this published as a RIPE document. Any comments from the WGs?

1 0