NZOC Monthly Report for March 2006

1.      NZRS Report

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

• System availability for March was  99.85% against the SLA standard of 99.9%

There were two incidents that caused the majority of the system unavailability during March.  The first occurred on 15 March, around 00:34 and was caused by an unusually high load on the system due to a registrar sending a high number of queries.  This caused the Front End Replication to stop functioning and it was unable to recover itself resulting in an outage of around 30 minutes.  A hot fix was applied that day and it has successfully dealt with similar loads.  NZRS have addressed this matter with the registrar involved to ensure it does not happen again.

The second incident occurred on 28 March at 16:44 hours and was the result of a hardware failure in the gateway/firewall server which meant the system was unreachable.  The primary site was switched to Wellington resulting in a outage of around 27 minutes.

Summary of the outages in March is:

• There were two scheduled maintenance windows utilised in March after the February one was moved to 5 March.
• Performance times for key transactions for March 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.

These figures show the average time taken from the point that the first Primary begins the zone push to the time that the last of the secondary’s acknowledges that it is up to date.

• The total number of WHOIS queries increased from 1,640,000 to 1,891,000. 
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• The level of active .nz domain names increased from 216,353 to 221,433, a net increase of 5,080. 

2.      .nz Policies and Procedures

2.1       Registrar Compliance

No major compliance issues were identified during March.

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.

3.      Registrar authorisation and connection

There was one authorisation as a .nz registrar in March, WebFarm.  There were no new connections to the production system.

4.      Other .nz matters

Members of the DNC staff, plus also NZOC representatives, attended the Wellington ICANN meeting at the end of March.  Sessions attended included the APTLD meeting (where the DNC gave a brief presentation on .nz and the DRS), the wwTLD and ccNSO meetings as well as other general sessions on the ICANN programme.  The DNC also sponsored a “happy hour” and covered the registrar costs of the “free .geek.nz” domain name promotion undertaken by Domainz.  Numbers for this were lower than expected with only 130 .geek.nz names registered as part of this.

It was a well organised meeting and our congratulations go to Keith Davidson and the “other side” of InternetNZ for all their hard work putting such a successful conference into effect.

5.      DRS Planning

Work during March included:

Interviews and appointments of the Experts

Undertaken by a panel consisting of Dr Frank March, Damian Broadley, Rose Percival and Debbie Monahan, the following were appointed following telephone interviews:

• Hon Sir Ian Barker QC
• Andrew Brown QC
• Clive Elliott
• Hon Robert Fisher QC
• Hon Barry Paterson QC
• Warwick Smith
• Terence Stapleton
• Dr Clive Trotman

Interviews and appointments of the Mediators

Undertaken by a panel consisting of Debbie Monahan, Penny Mudford and Rose Percival, the following were appointed following telephone interviews:

• Mark Beech
• David Carden
• Deborah Clapshaw
• Tim Clarke
• Nicola Crutchley
• Nigel Dunlop
• Christine Grice
• Kenneth Johnston
• Carol Powell
• Geoff Sharp

 All are associated with AMINZ (Arbitrators’ and Mediators’ Institute of New Zealand) or LEADR NZ (Leading Edge Alternative Dispute Resolvers New Zealand), or both.

Induction training for Experts

This was undertaken on Friday 31 March with attendance by all Experts a requirement of their selection to the panel.  Tony Willoughby, Chair of .uk Experts, and Emily Taylor, Director of Legal and Policy for Nominet, also attended the day and provided us all with the benefit of their experience.  Feedback from everyone was positive and the day was certainly worthwhile.

6.      DNC Office         

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

7.      Financial

With March being the end of the financial year, end of year accounts are still being finalised.  Financial information for March will therefore be included in the April report.

 
Frank March

Chair, NZOC