NZOC Monthly Report for October 2006

1. NZRS Report

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

• System availability for October was 99.97% against the SLA standard of 99.9%

Total downtime for the month was 14 minutes and 14 seconds. Most of this was due to micro outages with the only significant outage over the month being of 6 minute 30 second duration on 30 October.

• There were three scheduled maintenance windows utilised over the month as part of the continuing hardware upgrade.

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

• DNS SLA standards met

All name servers answered UDP queries for 100% of their scheduled uptime. NS4 failed to respond to TCP queries for a period of 11 minutes and 40 seconds around 6.45pm on 12 October.

Server % Availability

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 1,599,000 to 1,691,000.

• The level of active .nz domain names increased from 248,416 to 252,928. An increase of 4,512.

2. .nz Policies and Procedures

2.1 Registrar Compliance

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

2. Policy Reviews

• Based on submissions received for the Registering, Managing and Cancelling Domain Names policy review (which can be seen at http://dnc.org.nz/rmc-review) registrars have been asked their views on proposed changes to the UDAI requirements. A second consultation paper regarding proposed changes to policy about registration of .nz domain names is being drafted.

2. Applications

• An application for access to the zone file was declined. It was considered that the application did not meet the “exceptional circumstances” requirement of the Zone Transfer Policy. It was also considered that access to the zone file information was more a commercial, rather than a public good, benefit for the applicant.

3. Registrar authorisation and connection

No new registrars were authorised during October, and no further registrars connected to the production environment over the month.

4. Other .nz matters

• Legal action against NZ Domain Registration Limited continues. Work started on preparing documents for the ‘discovery’ phase which is due to be completed early November.

5. Dispute Resolution Service (DRS)

For the first five months, to 31 October 2006, 41 complaints have been received. Of those, 16 were deemed invalid for various reasons (including non .nz domain names and no paper copy being received). Of the 25 valid complaints:

• 4 have proceeded to an Expert determination (3 ordered transferred and 1 dismissed)

• 6 have been resolved prior to mediation (ie on notification of the complaint to the registrant)

• 7 have gone to mediation, with five of those being successfully resolved

• 1 complaint is currently with an Expert

• Remaining still proceeding through the process

Only one dispute has gone through the complete process of both mediation and an Expert determination.

6. DNC Office

• Following the evaluation of responses received as a result of a Request for Information for the Provision of Legal Services to the DNC, Izard Weston have been selected.

7. Financial

Financial report as at the end of October 2006

Frank March

Chair, NZOC