NZOC Monthly Report for July 2006

1. NZRS Report

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

• System availability for July was 99.89% against the SLA standard of 99.9%

The vast majority of the outage time was caused by a series of incidents between the 2^nd and 5^th of July when a registrar undertook an excessive number of requests that in effect caused a denial of service attack on the SRS. The registrar has been advised that they will be denied access to the SRS should the behaviour recur and that they will remain off the system until NZRS are satisfied that their systems are operating correctly. There were no further issues with the registrar for the remainder of the month.

• The scheduled maintenance window was utilised on 30 July 06

• Performance times for key transactions for July are in the following table:

• DNS SLA standards met

*NS6 did not respond to TCP queries for a period of 34 minutes and 15 seconds between 07:33:06 and 08:07:21 on 8 July. NS5 continued to respond throughout this period so there was no degradation of the Ultra DNS service.

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.

The measurements for the Primary name servers and NS1, NS2 and NS3 are taken by running the programme on the individual servers.

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 1,862.000 to 1,902.000.

• The level of active .nz domain names increased from 235,196 to 239,460. An increase of 4,264
  

2. .nz Policies and Procedures
   

2.1 Registrar Compliance

A complaint into a registrar’s activities has been received and is being investigated. The actions of the registrar did not directly impact on registrants.

2. Policy Reviews
   

• A review into the Registering, Managing and Cancelling Domain Names Policy commenced with submissions closing on 1 September.
  

2. Applications
   

• There was one application for access to the zone file lodged by a student at Victoria University of Wellington. The request asked for two copies of the zone file, one immediately and one a month later, to assist in a research project looking at domestic Internet topology and traffic engineering issues. This request was granted.

• An application for a new, moderated second level domain was received. An initial evaluation of the application by the DNC showed that it did not meet the standard required and was returned to the applicant with details of what needed to be done to get the application up to the required standard.
  

3. Registrar authorisation and connection
   

One registrar, Planet Domains from Australia, connected to the production environment in July. IP Mirror from Singapore was also authorised as a .nz registrar in July.

4. Other .nz matters
   

The DNC, together with the NZRS General Manager and InternetNZ Executive Director, met with Karaitiana Taiuru to discuss Internationalised Domain Names and their potential implementation into the .nz register. It is expected a paper will be put to the next NZOC meeting for discussion.

5. Dispute Resolution Service (DRS)
   

• Six new disputes were received of which two lapsed because we did not receive the hardcopies. Two disputes went to an Expert and one dispute went to Mediation.
  

• A mediator resigned from the panel to take up a position in Australia. Given there are still nine mediators on the panel, and that only one case has so far been referred to mediation, it was decided to continue with only nine mediators until the next planned time for appointments.
  

6. DNC Office
   A staff business planning day is being planned for August.
   

7. Financial

Frank March
Chair, NZOC