http://www.politechbot.com/p-03548.html
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!
"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
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!
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.
ISC has had very little in the way of problems as a .ZA slave
its the ac.za and co.za messes
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.
The net worked before DNS existed
'cept we hit this little scaling problem
I'm more concerned about well-meaning people and Secure-BGP than
DNS.
run a few thousand zones, and you'll worry about the dns too
randy
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
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
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