NZOC Monthly Report for February 2006

NZRS have produced their monthly report for January 2006.  Main points NZOC would like to highlight with Council are:

• System availability for February was  99.91% against the SLA standard of 99.9%

Total outage time for the month was 35 minutes and 56 seconds.  The majority of this (27 minutes and 24 seconds) was due to a ‘read only’ incident caused by a combination of events around the release domains time resulting in a succession of Front End replication restarts.  As a result of this issue arising, a five minute maintenance window has been scheduled around the release domains job.  This will stay in place until the fix installed to resolve the issue of synchronisation under the extreme load around release domains has been proven effective.

• The maintenance window for February was deferred for two weeks to 5 March 2006.
• Performance times for key transactions for February are in the following table:

• DNS SLA standards met with 100% availability

Server                           % Availability

Response Times

The figures are derived from the 'stress testing' of the name servers. 1201 UDP and 121 TCP transactions are used.   Measurements are in milli-seconds.

• SRS Zone Pushes

No issues have been reported with the zone pushes.

• The total number of WHOIS queries decreased from 1,767,000 to 1,640,000.  Several registrars have been working with NZRS on the management of WHOIS queries and how to manage apparent abusers of the service.

• The level of active .nz domain names increased from 213,194 to 216,353, a net increase of  3,159

.nz Policies and Procedures

2.1            Registrar Compliance

No significant compliance issues have been identified.

2.2       Policy Reviews

There are currently no reviews being undertaken

2.3            Applications 

No applications were received under the Zone Transfer Policy and no applications for a new Second Level Domain were received.

Registrar authorisation and connection

No further organisations were authorised as a .nz registrar over the month.  There were also no new connections to the production system.

Other .nz matters

• NZOC had its first meeting of the year on 21 February.  A copy of the minutes can be seen at http://dnc.org.nz/content//minutes_NZOC_21_Feb_06.pdf. Key decisions at the meeting included the confirmation of Andrew Brown QC as the Chair of .nz Experts and the draft Dispute Resolution Service Policy being approved.

DRS Planning

Work during February included:

• Applications for Experts and Mediators closed on 17 February and short listing for the Expert role was undertaken late in the month ready for interviews early March so that the successful applicants can be advised early enough to plan for the training being undertaken on 31 March.  The applications for the Mediator positions will be processed in March.

• Office systems and the website lodging of complaints and responses continued to be developed.

DNC Office   

• Recruitment is continuing for the Admin Officer role, mainly to support the DRS.

Financial

Financial results as at end of February 2005:

 Notes:

• There is significant expenditure due in March, including the various aspects of the DNC sponsorship of the ICANN conference.

Frank March
Chair, NZOC