NZOC Monthly Report for September 2007

NZOC report to Council.

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

There was a total of 14 seconds outage over the month.  Given the availability figure is rounded to two decimal places it is reported as being 100%.  This is the third consecutive month that a 100% availability figure has been reported.

§                Scheduled maintenance windows were utilised on 21 and 30 September.

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

§                DNS SLA standards met

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 increased from 2,719,000 to 2,934,000.

§              The level of active .nz domain names increased from 291,817 to 296,722.  An increase of 4,905.

.nz Policies and Procedures

2.1       Registrar Compliance

-                 Following a detailed investigation, a registrar has been found to have breached the .nz policies and procedures.  Over a short period last year, DiscountDomains took actions around the ‘Release Domains’ period that were contrary to how a .nz registrar should operate.  In essence, DiscountDomains ‘tested’ their capture process by seeking to register domain names that were coming out of pending release that they had no intention of retaining.  The names registered during the process under investigation were all cancelled within the five day registration grace period.

The registrations breached the .nz policies and procedures because they were not made at the request of an independent registrant or for DiscountDomains’ own use, they interfered with domain name registration by competing registrants and undermined the “first come, first served” principle on which the registration of .nz domain names is based.

It was accepted by the DNC that DiscountDomains had not intentionally sought to breach the requirements, and in fact they held an honest belief that what they were doing was acceptable.  That belief was incorrectly held however.  An article about the breach, naming DiscountDomains, will appear in the October .nz newsletter.  The article in the newsletter will also reiterate that domain names registered by authorised .nz registrars should be for a registrar’s own use only.  That use should also be a legitimate, and ongoing, use.

2.2              Policy Reviews

§                A third consultation paper on the RMC Policy review has been published for comments at http://dnc.org.nz/content//Third_Consultation_Paper.pdf.  At the time of writing this report, no submissions had been received.  As submissions are received they will be published at http://dnc.org.nz/rmc-3rdconsult.

2.3              Applications 

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

Registrar authorisation and connection

§                No registrars were authorised or connected to the production environment over September.

Other .nz matters

§                Work is progressing on the consultation document for the IDN Working Group.  The paper will be translated into Māori and both versions will be published on the DNC website.  It is expected that the consultation will begin around the middle of October and continue for two months.

§                NZOC met on 27 September.  A copy of the minutes is published online at http://dnc.org.nz/content//nzoc_minutes_27sep07.html

§                A review of registration and renewal prices charged by registrars was done prior to the announcement of the drop in the wholesale fee and after it had come into effect.  This showed that 9 registrars dropped their fees in line with the timing of the fee drop taking effect.

Dispute Resolution Service (DRS)

The DRS continues to get a reasonable level of complaints with 8 received during September.   Over 41% of the total valid claims received to date have been successfully resolved between the parties either at, or prior to, mediation and over 25% have proceeded to an expert determination.  The full DRS statistics are at http://www.dnc.org.nz/drs/index.php?clsid=1011

6.         DNC Office   

§                The DNC gave a presentation on the .nz Dispute Resolution Service, with a particular focus on the mediation aspects, to the LEADR conference held in Wellington

7.         Financial

Financial information for September 2007:

Richard Currey

NZOC Chair