proposed government regulation of .za namespace
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03548.html http://www.namespace.org.za/ Folks, A choice quote (not mine) from the URLs above :- "I write in my capacity as the person who brought the Internet to South Africa, who got permission for the country to use the ZA namespace in November 1990 and who has been the de jure administrator of the ZA namespace since February 1994." It is off-topic by virtue of the name of this list, but I think of general interest to the lists readers. Cheers, Andy!
Yes it is .. And I am aware of the great deal of assistance you provided for the initial UUCP links here. http://www.nsrc.org/about.html However, there is a larger arrogance he is battling - a poorly informed committee writing bad legislation that presumes they can do a better job of administering .za than he can. Cheers, Andy! On Fri, 24 May 2002, Randy Bush wrote:
"I write in my capacity as the person who brought the Internet to South Africa,
that must be mike lawrie. only he has such misplaced arrogance.
randy
what i did was negligible. many folk in za, vic shaw, jacot guillarmod, alan barrett, chris pinkham, and then the whole uucp crew up on the reef, did the real work. but mike did push it, though with vastly excessive use of violence.
However, there is a larger arrogance he is battling - a poorly informed committee writing bad legislation that presumes they can do a better job of administering .za than he can.
well, za and some of its principal subdomains are the highest error rate zones i secondary or use. but i can imagine a different part of the government doing an even funkier job. the contest is likely keen. but semi-clued governments and semi-clued folk in general seem to be attracted to the domain name space. i suspect it is one of those areas that appear simpler, more powerful, and more lucrative than they actually are. running a cctld well is a major pita with no thanks and thin rewards. randy
randy@psg.com (Randy Bush) writes:
well, za and some of its principal subdomains are the highest error rate zones i secondary or use. but i can imagine a different part of the government doing an even funkier job. the contest is likely keen.
ISC has had very little in the way of problems as a .ZA slave, fwiw. [phred.isc:alpha] ls -l *.[a-z][a-z] ?? -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 282852 May 25 08:41 bg -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 284449 May 25 08:04 br -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 5149177 May 25 07:59 cl -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 69640307 May 25 07:28 com.br -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 7722812 May 25 06:55 cz -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 15684581 May 25 04:33 fr -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 393 May 25 08:53 kailua-kona.hi.us -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 9585 May 25 08:38 palo-alto.ca.us -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 9409 May 25 04:57 za (btw, more are welcome if anybody else needs a feeless TLD/SLD slave.)
but semi-clued governments and semi-clued folk in general seem to be attracted to the domain name space. i suspect it is one of those areas that appear simpler, more powerful, and more lucrative than they actually are. running a cctld well is a major pita with no thanks and thin rewards.
brother, you just said a mouthful.
On Sat, May 25, 2002 at 09:04:40AM -0700, Randy Bush wrote:
ISC has had very little in the way of problems as a .ZA slave
its the ac.za and co.za messes
Try registering a domain with co.za if any of your nameservers sits on an RFC2317 classlessly delegated reverse, and where your nameserver does not recurse. They have a script that checks if YOUR nameserver knows about ITS ip address and they query for the 1:1 in.addr-arpa mapping. If your nameserver does not provide an answer they like, they are unable to let registration go through. Our nameservers reply with a SERVFAIL as they are not authoritative for their 1:1 in.addr-arpa mapping and only know about the RFC2317 indirected one. I argued about this with them *at length* and they kept inventing more reasons why I was breaking RFC compliance. They even told me they couldn't accept my nameservers as these would 'waste bandwidth' which was 'terriby expensive' in South Africa. It probably is, but that has nothing to do with my nameservers and their reverse delegation! In the end sanity more or less broke out and one of them stated that they were very busy with legislation &c and unable to change a script that was only causing problems for me and for nobody else. Now I doubt the last part, but I can understand them being undermanned. And then we gave it up. Good luck to them all. Regards, bert -- http://www.PowerDNS.com Versatile DNS Software & Services http://www.tk the dot in .tk http://lartc.org Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control HOWTO
bert hubert said:
[SNIP]
I argued about this with them *at length* and they kept inventing more reasons why I was breaking RFC compliance. They even told me they couldn't accept my nameservers as these would 'waste bandwidth' which was 'terriby expensive' in South Africa. It probably is, but that has nothing to do with my nameservers and their reverse delegation!
In the end sanity more or less broke out and one of them stated that they were very busy with legislation &c and unable to change a script that was only causing problems for me and for nobody else.
You are not the only one, We also have had many problems with them regarding this issue and were essentially stonewalled. Any of our users in the .co.za namespace are unable to use ns3 or ns4 of our nameservers. It's a shame especially because it seems to be such a worthless requirement. (Then again there are some registrars which require AXFR access from you) -davidu --------------- "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
that is because .co.za is still run like someone's personal website. I noted 2 _total_ outages of the network it sits behind just last week. The first was for over 30 minutes, can't remember the duration of the 2nd. With no offense to those running it, I have serious doubts about the technical feasability of the network it sits on, and the administration of it. we monitor and analyze changes in the za bgp table,and out of all the isp's in za, the most churn comes from AS6083. HUGE amounts, and all the time, routes are withdrawn and then re-advertised. They don't even have that many nets. Even if I look at the route churn of much larger providers in za, none of them come even close to the amount of churn that 6083 has, and their footprint isn't very big. Only people who come slighly close to that amount of churn are AS2686. Yes, there is a certain amount of churn which we can thank Telkom for (the incumbent Telco) but then I should expect an exponential amount of similar churn from other providers surely. Perhaps this is due to the fact that 1 of the directors (technical?) of Uniforum SA (www.uniforum.org.za) who are the proprietors of .co.za, is the owner of the sole isp who gives them connectivity. Regards --Rob
On Sat, 25 May 2002, Randy Bush wrote:
but semi-clued governments and semi-clued folk in general seem to be attracted to the domain name space. i suspect it is one of those areas that appear simpler, more powerful, and more lucrative than they actually are. running a cctld well is a major pita with no thanks and thin rewards.
The net worked before DNS existed, and could work after DNS. If DNS serves no other purpose than to keep semi-clued governments and semi- clued folks in general distracted from messing with things which could really break the net, its good. I'm more concerned about well-meaning people and Secure-BGP than DNS.
participants (7)
-
Andy Rabagliati -
bert hubert -
David Ulevitch -
fingers -
Paul Vixie -
Randy Bush -
Sean Donelan