ccTLD Best Practices Michuki Mwangi AfriNIC5 - INET/AfTLD Meeting, Balaclava, Mauritius 30th Nov 2006
Agenda 1. ccTLD Establishment 2. Policy Development 3. Registry Automation 4. Stability and Redundancy 5. Security Consideration
ccTLD Establishment
Considerations Stakeholder participation Involvement of Private sector Academia Civil Society Legal fraternity Government participation Government support
Considerations …(cont’d) Domain Registry Model Open or Closed Registry/Registrar etc Sustainability & Commercial Model Cost of registration CAPEX OPEX
Policy Development
Bottom up process Open Public forums Mailing lists Interactive media Registry/Board proposals
Registry Automation
Registry Software Identifying the appropriate Registry Software Guided by Registry model and policies Avoid re-inventing the wheel Saves on time and development costs Online System Online Registrations, Transfers etc Whois System
Monitoring & Statistics Its important to monitor Registry Services Ensures more uptime on services Open Source applications available for monitoring E.g Nagios, MRTG, webalizer, cflowd, etc Statistics enables projection and planning for growth
Stability & Redundancy
Selection of Slave DNS Servers RFC 2182 (BCP16) provides guidelines on selection of Secondary (slave) Servers. Consider geographic placement At least 2 Slave Servers and a master This helps spread name resolution load Improves efficiency with servers close to resolvers Avoid NAT
Finding Suitable Slave Servers Swap slave servers with other ccTLDs in the region (Common practice). AfTLD, ISOC can help find suitable hosts and organizations to host Slave servers. Consider Anycast hosting for slave servers
Hardware and Software Scalability is Key Provide sufficient memory, processor and disk space. DNS Software should be fast and capable of handling load (multiple queries per second)
Internet Connection Ensure upstream provider must be multi- homed Interconnect at the local/national IXP Registry should have redundant links to upstream provider Provider Independent (PI) IP address Space and ASN to enable for effective multi-homing
Security Considerations
Best Practice Implement routing security features Operating system hardening Disable Recursion Have a Stealth Server Run secure applications Run TSIG for secondary zone transfers
References ck1/day3/draft-wenzel-cctld-bcp-02.txt ck1/day3/draft-wenzel-cctld-bcp-02.txt services/ services/ ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2182.txt
Thank you