NZOC Monthly Report for December 2007

NZOC report to Council

§                System availability for December was 100% against the SLA standard of 99.9%

Total unscheduled outage time for the month was 26 seconds.

§                The scheduled maintenance window was utilised on 17 December 2007

§                Performance times for key transactions for December are in the following table:

§                DNS SLA standards met

There was an unscheduled outage to NS3 on 13 December between 02:42:16 and 03:50:14, a total of 1 hour, 8 minutes and 29 seconds.  It was caused by an outage to the TelstraClear connection in Avalon.  Telstra have confirmed that they were carrying out work to their network infrastructure in Christchurch and that this had an impact on the Avalon connection.

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

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 decreased from 2,736,000 to 2,588,000.

§              The level of active .nz domain names increased from 311,198 to 314,053.  An increase of 2855.

.nz Policies and Procedures

2.1       Registrar Compliance

§                No major compliance issues with registrars were identified in December

2.2              Policy Reviews

§                A review of the Dispute Resolution Service commenced in December.  Comments are sought on the operation of the current policy by midday on Wednesday 13 February 2008. Refer www.dnc.org.nz/drs-consult for the consultation paper and submissions.

2.3              Applications 

§                No applications for a new second level domain, or for access to the .nz zone file, were received during December. 

Registrar authorisation and connection

§                No registrars connected to the production environment during December, and there were no organisations authorised as a .nz registrar.

Other .nz matters

§                Consultation on the possible implementation of IDNs into the .nz domain name space started in October and closed on 19 December.  Ten submissions were received with a mix of those supporting and those opposing the introduction of IDNs into the .nz space.  Issues raised by those against an IDN implementation were generally around security and confusion with the standard ASCII characters, for example being used in phishing.  The consultation paper, together with published submissions received, can be read at http://www.dnc.org.nz/idn-consult.  A meeting of the IDN Working Group is planned for February to discuss the submissions received.

§                An analysis of retail domain registration and renewal prices since the wholesale fee drop on 1 July 2007, shows that 9 registrars have dropped their fees.

Dispute Resolution Service (DRS)

Of the six complaints received in December, only one was deemed invalid.  Almost 38% of the total valid complaints received to date have been successfully resolved between the parties either at, or prior to mediation and over 26% have proceeded to an Expert decision.  The full DRS statistics are at http://www.dnc.org.nz/drs-statistics.

6.         DNC Office   

§                At the InternetNZ Council meeting in December, it was agreed to incorporate Domain Name Commission Limited.  This was done and work is now progressing on the requirements to have the company operational on 1 April 2008.

7.         Financial

Financial information for December 2007:

Richard Currey

Chair, NZOC