The final stage of the SRS Implementation occurred on 7 December when the first competitive registrars connected to the production SRS. Three competitive registrars connected on the first day and by the end of December there were eight authorised registrars who had connected to the SRS.

Another 10 organisations were authorised as .nz registrars but had not connected to the SRS as at the end of December. The full list of authorised registrars can be found at http://www.dnc.org.nz/story/30056-28-1.html.

Use of WHOIS information

The rules governing the use of the WHOIS server (located at whois.srs.net.nz) state that the following activities are forbidden:

• Using multiple WHOIS queries, or using the output of multiple WHOIS queries in conjunction with any other facility or service, to enable or effect a download of part or all of the .nz Register.

• Using any information contained in the WHOIS query output to attempt a targeted contact campaign with any person, or any organisation, using any medium.

To assist us in ensuring these rules are adhered to, all transactions on the WHOIS are monitored. Where it is considered that access on the WHOIS is of an unreasonable, and unexplained, level the IP address involved may be blocked from further access. This happened to two IP addresses during December.

One alleged breach of the WHOIS information was followed up in December, following a complaint made to the DNC. The complaint arose following an unsolicited email sent to a number of recipients by Lymree Database Technologies. An investigation of SRS WHOIS transactions showed that the party involved had not obtained their information from that source. Neither was there any evidence of another party obtaining the information from the SRS WHOIS on their behalf. Lymree Database Technologies have responded to a letter from the DNC asking them where they obtained their information and stated that it was based on the NZ Companies Office database, with additional information from other public registers. The DNC has informed the Companies Office of the incident but, given there was no evidence of a breach of the .nz policies, there is nothing further that can be done in this case.

Statistics

Figures for December 2002:

NZ REGISTRY SERVICES

With 8 Registrars coming on stream on the production SRS and the continued flow of applications for connection to the test SRS meant that December was an interesting and again a busy month.

The 7 December was the first day of the competitive market and there were registrars that made the move that day with another 5 going live during the rest of the month. As part of the going live was the transferring of names, this has gone smoothly with most Registrars choosing to have bulk transfers done for them.

There were two outages during December that affected SRS, on 24 December the Test system suffered an outage and on 30 December the Production SRS suffered its first unscheduled outage since going live.

There will be a scheduled outage on 22 January to allow for the Production SRS to be upgraded, please refer Scheduled Outages and Updates, note also that there will be an updated RIK being published to reflect the updates.

Some of the milestones in December were:

Connections
At 31 December there were 21 organisations with access to the test system and 9 registrars connected to the production system.

Production SRS
The SRS Production system availability:

	October	November	December
%	100	100	99.92

December period response time performance figures on the production environment were:

Avg Response time	November 2002	December 2002
Domain Details Query	1.238	0.930
Domain Update	0.250	0.190
Domain Create	0.320	0.244
Whois	0.349	0.171
Whois queries at back end including Registrar (volume)	13260	489705
Whois Server Queries		244233

Outages
There was an unscheduled outage to the production environment the outage details are below.

Production SRS Outage Report - 20021230-1
Outage Date/Time - 30/12/2002 15:43
Reinstatement Date/Time - 30/12/2002 16:17
Total Outage Time - 0hrs 34 minutes
Impact High - Production SRS unavailable to all users Whois unavailable

Cause - All three backends returned differing responses to an extract transaction as a result of not having an ordering function in the response from the servers. As a result of the servers identifying the variance in responses, the three servers the servers reacted in a predictable manner of self preservation and shut themselves down.

Action required - The Servers were verified for correctness/integrity prior to being made online. The transaction has been modified to order the response. Other extracts are being reviewed and will be modified if required.

Test System
There was an unscheduled outage on the 24 December as a result of an unscheduled refresh of the Test System being done. The outage has had a formal review and steps have been taken to ensure that this does not occur again. The outage meant that the test system was unavailable for 38 minutes.

Scheduled Outages and Updates
There will be a scheduled outage of SRS Production on 22 January 2003 20:00 - 20:30 to allow for the next production release to put into production. This outage will also affect the whois server.

Preparation of scheduled upgrade to SRS
Details of the modifications have been forwarded to Registrars and posted on the NZRS website www.nzrs.net.nz and DNC website at http://www.dnc.org.nz/content//scheduled_outage_22_january.pdf. The test SRS system will be updated with the new SRS updates following the scheduled refresh on Friday 17 January.

RIK
The RIK has been updated to reflect the modifications that will be implemented on 22 January. The latest version of the RIK is available at http://dnc.org.nz/content/rik.zip.

Any comments?
If you have any questions or concerns about the SRS, please don't hesitate to contact us. For registry or technical matters, contact Nick Griffin at support@nzrs.net.nz. For all other matters, contact Debbie Monahan at dnc@dnc.org.nz

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'.