Re: against broken tld content

[Bruce Campbell <bruce.campbell@ripe.net>]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Masataka Ohta wrote:

> Below is a revised draft ID with the following changes.
>
> 3) some text added to "3. Actions of ISPs".
>
> > If such action considerably reduces the number of available TLD servers,
> > ISPs may operate their own servers overriding the IP addresses
> > of formal TLD servers.
> > Such overriding servers should have
> > a copy of old zone content known not to be broken.

You are still making the assumption that a given TLD is being operated on
its own set of nameservers.  What is the suggested behaviour for ISPs
where one nameserver hosts a _lot_ of TLDs, and just one TLD has 'broken'
content?

In the not-so-hypothetical case of ns.ripe.net, I suspect that the other
98 TLDs hosted on there would be a tad annoyed at ISP's local over-riding
of their data, assuming that the ISPs could get a hold of the complete
data in the first place.

> 2. Actions of TLD Server Operators
>
>    A TLD server operator who have found that TLD zone content is broken
>    should disable zone transfer

This is ill-defined.  The TLD server operator should disable zone
transfers from being possible from its nameserver, or it should disable
its nameserver from making zone transfers ?

> and use a copy of old zone content known
>    not to be broken.

Sounds reasonable, although it still depends on the TLD server operator
making regular backups of the zone content that its server publishes.

>    Or, if the fix for the zone content is obvious and easy, the operator
>    may manually or automatically edit the content of the current most
>    one without updating SOA serial number. In this case, zone transfer
>    may not be disabled, though actions of ISPs described in section 3
>    may make the transfer from servers of broken content impossible.

I dislike the 'without updating' the SOA serial number.  It would be
better, IMHO, to have an intentional mismatch of SOA serial numbers
between the 'broken' versions and the 'corrected' versions.  Having
seemingly identical editions of the zone with varying behaviour about is a
headache when faultfinding.

( Actually I dislike the entire concept of editing the zone content,
  especially in cases where you are not the primary source of said
  content. )

-- 
                             Bruce Campbell           I speak for myself

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