DNC Newsletter - August 2002

As stated during the July presentations, the Registrar Implementation Kit (RIK) will be available on the DNC website at www.dnc.org.nz on Friday 6 September, sometime after 3pm. An email advising providers the information is on the site will sent out to all those who have subscribed to the "Registrar Information" category on the DNC website.

.nz

The main focus during August has been on establishing the .nz Policies and Procedures required for when the SRS is implemented in October. It is acknowledged by the DNC and the .nz Oversight Committee (NZOC) that the restricted timeframe has limited the consultation that could take place on draft policies and procedures. It was important that key policies and procedures were available for potential registrars as part of the Registrar Implementation Kit that will be released on 6 September. Accordingly, the process during August involved limited consultation.

The content of the policies and procedures is in line with the general policy principles agreed for the SRS and these have been widely publicised. A lot of what has been worked on has been widely consulted on by Rose Percival and Doug Mercer in their planning of the SRS.

The NZOC acknowledged that more public input into policies and procedures would be valuable and agreed that those being published initially for the SRS would be subject to review, including external comment, following the implementation.

At the August InternetNZ Council meeting, it was agreed that .maori.nz would be open for registrations following the 11am zone push on Thursday 5 September. Registrations will be on a "first come, first served" basis like other domains, and names in this space are able to be registered by all providers as the domain is not moderated.

Technical Implementation
Implementation of the computer system to support the SRS is proceeding to schedule. The bulk of the development has been completed and we are now well into the acceptance test phase. The hardware for the Wellington site is installed and running and the Auckland equipment will be arriving soon. While there is still a lot more testing to be performed, hundreds of test transactions have been submitted to date and the system has remained stable, and returned consistent results, throughout. In two weeks time, we will start testing the data redundancy and disaster recovery aspects of the system.

Many .nz providers use the WHOIS server currently running from the DRS at Domainz. When the SRS is implemented, new arrangements will need to be made to handle the new server. More information about the new WHOIS server is available on this site in [outdated link]

As mentioned above, the Registrar Implementation Kit will be published on Friday September 6th. Among other things, it will contain a set of technical specifications to enable registrars to build their SRS client systems. It will also contain some open source software that is pre-built to do the job. In the next few weeks we will add an HTML user interface to the kit, thus making a complete registrar package for those that wish to use it.

Any comments?
If you have any questions or concerns about the SRS implementation, please don't hesitate to contact us. For technical matters, contact Doug Mercer. For all other matters, contact Debbie Monahan

Please note
If you would like to be notified of future updates, please use the subscribe function on the DNC site and select the category 'Newsletters'.