[dns-operations] Akamai now works with ENT (Empty Non-Terminals)?

[Dave Lawrence]

Jared Mauch writes:
> Yes. I know Tale spent a long time working on this and I believe all
> the software went live recently on this.

In the credit-where-credit-is-due department, Jon Reed did the yeomans
work of identifying affected customers and running them down to figure
out how to best address their individual circumstances.  My primary
contributions were identifying the problems, advocating fixes,
designing a new feature to achieve what some customers clearly
desired, and taking the slings and arrows of you folks about the whole
issue.

I've seen the rest of this thread but didn't quite see one thing
explicitly addressed by Jon, but which I am comfortable is public
enough knowledge -- and observable behavior -- to point out for
additional context.   Akamai's authoritative nameserver operates in
several different modes depending on just what type of zone it is
trying to serve, whether it be for CDN mapping, simple zone hosting,
customer datacenter traffic direction, or several others.  There
wasn't just one area of the code that needed special attention for
ENTs, but several different parts that all had different levels of
accessibility for customer configuration of names.

The one zone that was most evident to people working on
qname-minimisation had its mode fixed quite rapidly, which exposed 
the wildcard issue.  Many zones running under that mode were thus made
compatible quickly, but sadly the zone that got all the attention was
particularly hairy to deal with because it was constructed with data
from many, many different customers who had different requirements and
personal response times, (This whole Internet thing would work so much
more smoothly without customers, you know?)  That's where Jon and his
team spent so much of their time trying to get things all sorted out
to where they could finally flip that zone over to being strict on
ENTs and wildcards.

Beyond that, the other modes needed their own attention from
developers and things got cleaned up a lot.  I don't know what the
current status is, as I've been gone from Akamai for over a year now,
but I believe they've got only just a few rarely-encountered edge
cases where ENTs could be a problem now.  Perhaps Jon could comment if
they've hit 100% yet.