Discuss mailing list

[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

A recent discussion has brought up the possibility that not all tier2 
servers may be carrying the same root zone, or even staying up to date 
with the file.  This came to light when a user noticed they couldn't 
resolve an icann TLD that was created this April.

So I would like to start a discussion on policies and testing 
methodology.  First, what should we consider to be a standard policy for 
the public tier2 servers?  The wiki pages on setting up a tier2 server 
all state that the root zone should be slaved from NS0, however if you 
are not running BIND then slaving a zone may not be possible (although 
this setup should be passing the queries on to one of the tier1 
servers).  There is also the situation where some folks also run servers 
for other alt-roots, and they may not have the tools available to merge 
multiple root zones together...  Do we want to enforce the usage of the 
opennic root zone for tier2 servers (complete with dnssec entries), or 
do we want to keep the openness that our project was created on, and 
allow for the possibility of other root zones?

Second, how should we test for functionality of the root zone?  If we 
insist on everyone using opennic's root, then it could be as simple as 
checking the serial and making sure it is within a couple days of what 
NS0 has posted.  However if we want to remain open, we still want to 
ensure that the tier2 servers are carrying recent changes to 
icann/opennic TLDs, but how do we detect that?  It could be quite a 
chore to try and detect every time a new TLD is added to the icann list, 
and we certainly couldn't reply on matching the serial for the root zone 
if everyone is using a different source.

One more point -- the server that caused the original discussion has 
been updated, so at this point every tier2 server is currently resolving 
an up-to-date opennic root zone.  This means if we wanted to make it a 
policy to require the use of our root, nobody would have to change 
anything, and the policy would only have to be enforced moving forward 
with new servers.