On Oct 29, 2013, at 12:21 PM, Calvin Browne wrote:

> On 29/10/2013 11:45, Jim Reid wrote:
>> On 29 Oct 2013, at 09:24, Calvin Browne <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm going to point out that .se went down because of a problem right at 
>>> this point relativly recently.
>> IIRC, that problem had nothing to do with whether the TLD's NS RRset was in 
>> the zone or not. Something went wrong with zone file generation and that 
>> RRset got corrupted somehow. [When the authoritative NS RRset gets mangled, 
>> it doesn't matter if the targets of those NS records are inside or outside 
>> the zone.] Things still worked (sort of). The delegation info at the root 
>> was unchanged and valid. Resolvers got referrals to the authoritative .se 
>> name servers even though those servers might not have had NS records in the 
>> .se zone itself.
>> 
> From memory - a script bungled the generation of the ns.se zone.
> Having NS's outside of this zone would have meant a less catastrophic 
> failure.

Incorrect. "ns.se" is not a zone and cannot be delegated, it's locked for 
delegation and is *only* used for the in-bailiwick names of NS-records for .SE. 
This it what I earlier referred to as "in-zone dependancy", for .SE there are 
*no* dependancies whatsoever so "ns.se" cannot break - because it's not a zone.

> the .ng case was similar, the administrator passed away, and the zone 
> all the .ng NSes were in
> wasn't renewed, so it was suspended and .ng dissappeared. This incident 
> went unreported AFAIK,
> even though .ng was down for two or so days.

This is what worried me about having *any* "real" zones where names of 
TLD-level name servers reside; if the names themselves are delegated you're 
suddenly opening up a whole bunch of potential dangers IMHO. And, of course, 
especially outside your own name space for reason mentioned earlier.

> *my personal analysis* is that both these incidents would have been 
> prevented by having NS's in
> zones outside the registry's direct control.

As I said, for the *exact* problem we faced this would have helped. We're 
however much more paranoid about features such as ORIGIN now so I strongly 
doubt it will happen again. ;)

> So *I* understand when people say this naming scheme appears brittle, 
> and *I* get the same feeling.
> 
> [of course - there are other factors that come into play - reply sizes, 
> managing external relationships,
> and even IANA gluing policies which make updates to tld's more cumberson 
> when a NS set is in
> different zones]
> 
> --Calvin
> 
> PS - the .se stuff was in 2009 - so I used 'relatively recently' 
> incorrectly - apologies.

I understand why different organizations have different solutions; as you've 
all found out our method of naming is quite sensitive to features such as 
$ORIGIN. However; our solution is very nice with DNSSEC as every single record 
is signed and it's also very robust to "outside tampering". If there was a 
silver bullet for naming I think everyone would have that specfic schema, afaik 
there is none - and to be honest, perhaps this is good for the Internet, 
diversity never killed anyone, right? ;)


        /Regards, Einar

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