[dns-operations] D9.INFO.AFILIAS-NST.ORG

[Joe Abley]

On 19 Apr 2008, at 00:16 , Larry Brower wrote:

> There appears to be an issue with D9.INFO.AFILIAS-NST.ORG. Anyone  
> know anything about this?
>
>
> info.                   172800  IN      NS      D9.INFO.AFILIAS- 
> NST.ORG.
>
> dig: couldn't get address for 'D9.INFO.AFILIAS-NST.ORG': not found

Here are some observations from me as an individual, without the  
benefit of any deep digging, log hunting or peer review from others at  
Afilias.

It looks as though some records were dropped from the INFO.AFILIAS- 
NST.INFO and INFO.AFILIAS-NST.ORG zones at the same time as the apex  
NS set for INFO was updated, in preparation for a request to the IANA  
to make a corresponding change in the root zone.

Those two zones are served by a subset of the nameservers which serve  
INFO. Those that server INFO and also INFO.AFILIAS-NST.(INFO|ORG)  
would have reported NXDOMAIN for queries of the form "d9.info.afilias- 
nst.info IN A?". It seems possible that those that only serve INFO  
might have returned what Ed Lewis calls a "hybrid" response,  
incorporating the appropriate (glue) A record in the answer section.

The records were re-inserted at a later time, but apparently those  
changes did not propagate immediately. They have propagated now, I see.

There was no change to the presence of corresponding glue in the root  
or INFO zones for those hosts.

There seems to be no problem right now, diagnostic, operational or  
otherwise.

I have seen no sign that there was ever a production problem for  
lookups of INFO-registered domains. However, this is not any kind of  
official incident report, others' mileage may vary, contents may have  
settled in transit, etc.

Thanks for bringing this up here.

As a meta-point, to help future diagnosis of such things, we (Afilias)  
could probably incorporate a notification to this list in our  
procedures for arranging apex or delegation set NS changes. Feedback  
on whether that would be useful to see here would be most welcome.


Joe