[ppml] Policy Proposal: Modification to Reverse Mapping Policy

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> Why should ARIN give out referalls to servers that 
> *intentionally* timeout?

Because ARIN's customer asks them to do this.

> Why should ARIN be a party in wasting other people's time and 
> resources?

Because the people whose resources are being wasted are customers of the
organization which intentionally has their servers timeout.

About a year ago, I was called in to help sort out a major incident for
a customer of ours. Our customer was providing a service over the
network to hundreds of their customers. This service was delivered by an
application which their customers ran. One day last year, hundreds of
these customers were unable to login to the service at the beginning of
the day.

The cause? Verisign, in their wisdom, had cleaned up a bunch of lame
delegations in the .com zone by replacing the registered nameservers
with two nameservers in lame-delegation.org. The application that our
customer provides their customers, depends on a certain domain being
lame, and when it did not get the correct error, it was unable to
connect to it's servers. 

That's right, I said CORRECT ERROR. I didn't design the application, but
that is how it works. The solution was to put back the lame delegation
in the .com zone, and then to transfer the registration to another
registrar who will ensure that the lame delegation is left untouched in
the future. 

I have no problem with ARIN auditing the behavior of nameservers
registered for in-addr.arpa, and I have no problems with ARIN contacting
the right people (not the wrong people) at the organizations to discuss
the results of said audits. But I do have a problem with ARIN removing
records when a nameserver is "intentionally" lame.

ARIN is not the Internet police. ARIN allocations are used for many
other networks other than the Internet. ARIN currently does not maintain
the right contact info (DNS administrators) for organizations.

And most of all, punitive policy sets a bad precedent for ARIN when we
can expect increasing scrutiny of our activities due to IPv4 exhaustion
looming.

--Michael Dillon