Massive Scale Name Management: Lessons Learned from the.COM Namespace Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Outline l Humble Beginnings l Current InterNIC Statistics l Issues dealing with Growth l Future

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Humble Beginnings l Sun IPC as a root server, Sun 470 “everything” server, ELC workstations, one T1 l 8 people on staff l Much of the work was hand-edited to fit into the database l Enforcement of rules by community - esp for # of domains and gtld placement

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Cumulative Registrations

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Net Registration Growth

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Top-Level Domain Distribution as of March 31, 1999* *Includes deleted names ORG 6.8% EDU 0.1% OTHER 0.0% NET 10.3% COM 82.8%

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Domain Updates Per Month

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Telephone Requests

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Whois Queries by Month ** Data was not available for this report

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Monthly Sent to Hostmaster Address

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA a.root-servers.net Query Traffic

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA What it Took To Build This l Technology – Queued System that is scalable – HA solutions with failover – Automate everything – Authenticate as much as possible – 24x7 NOC to detect/fix failures as they occur l 200MB of bandwidth l 200 Engineers/Operations to support it

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA What It Took to Build This l Customer service – Fallacy is automating reduces customer contact with human support – Problem is dealing with transfers based on authentication problems l Records – Registrant Name Change Agreements in a month - 8,792 – Phone calls answered in a day - 4,800 l 1.8 Million pieces of sent a month to hostmaster l Staffing people

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA What It Took to Build This l Legal – Was on the forefront of the domain/trademark battle – The Knowledgnet case of 1995 brought forth NSI’s trademark dispute policy – Is a very controversial policy and not well understood – To date, NSI has yet to lose a case l Political – As it got bigger, NSI received more scrutiny – Domain wars ensued, Govt. involved, ICANN formed

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Future l Competition within COM/NET/ORG l Registrar/Registry Split – Amendment 12 with the Department of Commerce is the driver l Key Dates – April 26 - test bed open to 5 registrars accredited by ICANN – Jun 25 - unlimited registrars accredited by ICANN - postponed until Sep 10 – Oct 25 - show equal access to all registrars including NSI l Shared registry is at

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Future l What is in the registry? – Domains, hosts, and registrar info – Registrar interaction with registry works across an ASCII protocol that is tunneled over SSL – Overview is at l Who has helped create it? – NSI – Panel of Internet experts have convened to help critique it

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA Future l What other issues are upcoming? – DNS security – Better management of DNS zones with incremental change support built into the server itself – Better forms of authentication to reduce customer support

Mark Kosters 20 Aug 1999 TWIST Conference University of California, Irvine, CA URL l This presentation can be viewed at the following URL: –