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You are here: Home Proceedings Committee Proceedings .nz Oversight Committee Archive 2002 NZOC Report to Council December 2002

NZOC Report to Council December 2002

Until now, NZOC has issued a report for Council to fit with Council meeting dates. NZOC have decided that there is benefit in providing a regular monthly report to Council, highlighting some of the key activities and statistics of the previous month. This report would be provided to Council around the 20th of the following month. Additional reports to cover specific Council meeting topics will still be produced as required.

This report covers December 2002. It also incorporates aspects of the monthly report from NZRS to the DNC.

SRS Implementation

The first competitive registrars connected to the SRS as planned on Saturday 7 December. No technical problems were encountered with any of the connections and all registrars were successfully undertaking transactions on the SRS within moments of being connected.

With the connection of the first competitive registrars, the SRS can be considered successfully implemented.

NZRS Report

NZRS have produced their first monthly report to the DNC. Points from that report that NZOC would like to highlight to Council are:

  • System availability for December was 99.92, against the SLA standard of 99.9%

The first unscheduled outage of the SRS occurred on 30 December. This resulted from an extract transaction, related to the billing process, missing the bit of code to tell the SRS what order to return the results in. Without that, the three servers returned differently order results, then recognised there was a variance and shut themselves down as they are programmed to do.

  • Performance times for key transactions were within those set in the SLA.
Transaction Average Response Times (in seconds)
As per SLA December 2002
Domain Details Query 1.5 0.930
Domain Update 0.4 0.190
Domain Create 0.6 0.244
Get Message 0.6 0.505
Whois 0.5 0.171
  • A large number of whois queries were undertaken - 489705 in total.

Whois transactions are being monitored to ensure transactions don't exceed certain volumes or appear automated. During December, two IP addresses were blocked from accessing the whois due to what was considered to be an unreasonable, and unexplained, level of access.

  • The level of active .nz domain names reached 120,000

There was a net increase in the number of domain names in December of 1,107, taking the number of registered, and active, .nz domain names to 120,833.

It is planned to develop statistical reporting further and to start providing more analysis of what is happening in the .nz market. Statistics will be included initially in the .nz newsletter that is published. Eventually they will be published on the DNC site in a specific category. At this time there is no plan to publish specific registrar figures, however this will be discussed with the Registrar Advisory Group.

Note: The SLA is currently with NZRS as they are completing the performance criteria for the DNS. This is expected to be finalised during January 2003 and will be forwarded to NZOC and the NZRS Board for final signoff. References to the SLA standards above, reflect those in the versions already sighted by NZOC.

.nz Policies and Procedures

The review of the Second Level Domain policy was announced and expressions of interest for the working group sought. Nominations for the working group closed on 6 January and the list will go to NZOC for final determination of who will work with the DNC on this review.

At the same time as the Second Level Domain review was announced, people were reminded that they could raise issues with the .nz policies at any time by sending an email to policies@dnc.org.nz.

Registrar matters

Three competitive registrars connected to the SRS on 7 December, the first day that registrars could connect. One more registrar connected in that first week and by the end of December there were eight authorised registrars who had connected to the SRS. These registrars are:

  • WebAddress
  • iSERVE
  • 5Star Net
  • RegisterDIRECT
  • Iconz
  • ProDNS / Orcon Internet
  • The Packing Shed
  • Catalyst IT

There were another 10 registrars who were authorised as at the end of December 2002 but who had not connected to the SRS. These registrars are:

  • 2day.com
  • DiscountDomains.co.nz
  • Actrix
  • Watchdog Corporation
  • pdom.com
  • InSPire
  • FreeParking
  • SiliconBlue
  • RegisterDomains
  • SouthNet

Twenty four applications in total were received by the DNC between 14 October and 31 December 2002. The six applications not referred to in the tables above are still all being processed.

General .nz matters

  • .geek.nz Second Level Domain

The Request for Discussion (RFD) for the creation of .geek.nz got off to a good start with a lot of comment on the public discuss list, and in other places as well. The initiators of the .geek.nz application also set up their own website to encourage support for the application. This site can be found at http://geek.nznog.org/.

Financial

Financial situation as at end November 2002:

  Month YTD
EXPENDITURES Actual Budget Variance Actual Budget Variance
Office of the DNC            
Personnel and Staff costs 9202.11 21875.00 12672.89 67881.41 109375.00 41493.59
Office and Admin 00.44 5,83.33 3494.66 11305.16 28416.67 10087.34
Supplies Materials
and Maint
-5211.77     7024.17    
Professional Services -5588.38 6191.67 11780.05 41300.12 30958.33 -10341.79
Communications 1256.98 4333.33 3076.35 10802.68 21666.67 10863.99
.nz Oversight and
other cmtes
2886.50 5166.67 2280.17 11865.18 25833.33 13968.15
Registry/Registrar
Committee
604.10 3125.00 2520.90 1089.64 15625.00 14535.36
Industry Representation - - - 44.44 - -44.44
Implementation
Contingency
16200.00 8783.33 -7416.67 16200.00 43916.67 42827.03
Depreciation - 333.33 333.33 - 1666.67 -14,533.33
TOTALS 26749.98 55491.67 28741.69 167512.80 277458.33 108855.89

Notes:

  • Some re-coding of expenses was done this month, thus the negative monthly values for Professional Services and within the Office expenses. The YTD figures are correct.
  • Personnel and Staff costs reflected for the month are too low. This is a recording issue as the October figures incorporated some of the November staff costs. The YTD figure is correct.
  • Given the SRS Implementation is now complete, no further expenditure from the Implementation Contingency budget will occur.
Frank March
Chair, NZOC
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