NZOC Monthly Report for August 2006

1. NZRS Report

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

• System availability for August was 99.99% against the SLA standard of 99.9%

Unscheduled outages over the month were as micro-outages totalling 5 minutes and 33 seconds over the month.

• There were two scheduled maintenance windows utilised over the month, one of which was to facilitate the installation of a new gateway in Wellington.

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

• DNS SLA standards met

Server % Availability

*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 August. NS5 continued to respond throughout this period so there was no degradation of the Ultra DNS service.

Performance Stress Testing

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 1,902.000 to 1,969,000.

• The level of active .nz domain names increased from 239,460 to 244,608. An increase of 5,148 over that at the end of July.

2. .nz Policies and Procedures

2.1 Registrar Compliance

• A complaint into a registrar’s activities continues to be investigated.

2. Policy Reviews

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

2. Applications

• There was one application for access to the zone file lodged. This request was refused as it was considered the benefits were for the applicant’s clients only and not for the public good.

3. Registrar authorisation and connection

One registrar connected to the production environment. No further organisations were authorised as registrars over the month.

4. Other .nz matters

During August there was a mass mail-out to .nz registrant by NZ Domain Registration Limited. The “offer” was similar to that previously undertaken in that registrants of .co.nz domain names were offered different variants of their name, particularly .net.nz, in a notice that appeared like an invoice for their current domain name.

Legal action was undertaken and an injunction obtained to prevent any monies from leaving New Zealand until the matter was decided. The court order can be seen at http://dnc.org.nz/content/court_order.pdf.

The defendant has 30 days to file a Statement of Defence which means that they have until around mid-September. We remain committed to the legal action being undertaken and a strategy for the substantive hearing will be developed once we have seen the Statement of Defence, if any is lodged.

5. Dispute Resolution Service (DRS)

The DNC did a presentation on the DNC Office and the DRS to the annual meeting of AMINZ. This presentation was as part of a panel also involving Beverley Wakem (Office of the Ombudsmen), Liz Brown (Banking Ombudsman), Hilary Souter (Advertising Standards Authority) and Rae Lamb (Deputy Health and Disability Commissioner).

In respect of the DRS, August saw the first successful mediation of a case, and the first decision issued by an Expert. At the end of August, three other disputes had had fees paid and were with Experts pending their decisions.

6. DNC Office

A staff business planning day was held in August. Good discussions were had regarding the work commitments for the next 12-18 months.

7. Financial

Financial report as at the end of August 2006

Frank March

Chair, NZOC