Internet Draft                                              Bill Manning
April 1996                                                           ISI
Expires in six months


                  Technical Criteria for Root and TLD Servers
                    draft-manning-dnssvr-criteria-00.txt

Abstract

   This draft proposes criteria for servers and their environments that
   will support zones for top level and root domains. It is expected that
   the machines running root service will be different than the machines
   running TLD service. Although there are differences, the same basic
   criteria should hold. It is expected that TLD servers may field more
   queries and the root servers may be more concerened with cache pollution.

   Although this draft has been discussed in various bodies, it is not
   final, it should not be regarded as a consensus document, and it is
   presented for open debate in the Internet community.

Status of this Memo

   This document wants to be an Internet-Draft.  Internet-Drafts are working
   documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas,
   and its working groups.  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as ``work in progress.''

   To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the
   ``1id-abstracts.txt'' listing contained in the Internet- Drafts
   Shadow Directories on ds.internic.net (US East Coast), nic.nordu.net
   (Europe), ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast), or munnari.oz.au (Pacific
   Rim).

Design Goals:

        Define the basic set of requirements for TLD/Root server hardware.
        Make them all objectively verifiable.

Disclaimer:

        This document doesn't discuss actual placement of servers.
        Procedures for dealing with non-compliance are not covered in
        this memo.

Selected Operational Qualifications:

. Modern BIND or equivalents (if any exist).
        The upgrade process will be coordinated with the zone-master staff
        and will occur within 96 hours of inital notification. Zone-master
        senior staff will specify the software and version(s) that will
        be run in a particular zone.

. UDP checksums enabled.

. Dedicated host
        no user accounts, just the operations & admin or root account.
        no other services except NTP. (remove telnet, SMTP, FTP etc).
        This requires support to be from the console or other specified
        secure channel. It is expected that one-time tokens will be used
        for authentication.

. Singly homed (only one interface).

. Protected:
   In general, each server must be adequately protected against security
   threats.  The system administrator must stay up-to-date on the latest
   security methods and threats and must implement reasonable security
   countermeasures. Audits by the zone administrator or authorized agents
   will be permitted and corrective measures will be taken. A good way to
   keep current is to follow the CERT recommendations.  A reasonable approach
   is to only run DNS sw, NTP and ICMP support with extensive logging.
   Recommended packages to assist are tcp_wrappers and ipfilter. Any other
   package which is an acceptable technology is fine.

. Servers time is synchronized via NTP.
   This is useful for supporting functions; e.g. logging. It is expected that
   future enhancements such as dynamic update and security support will take
   advantage of accurate clocks.

. Sufficient resources to support a transaction rate of 1200/sec and
   mean time to respond of 0.5 seconds per transaction.  There should be
   enough extra resources available to support a 15% growth in the number of
   transactions per second without affecting the response time.

. Representative on TLD/Root administrator list is responsive:
        8a. e-mail about required changes will be answered within 24 hours;
        8b. vacations will cause responsibilities to be delegated, not ignored;
        8c. contact numbers on file with zone-master senior staff members;
        8d. an escalation/delegation list that has at least three levels of
            hierarchy.

. Named.boot file will specify...
        9a. "xfrlist" of local nets and maybe other roots;
        9b. server will use "secondary" from the zone master, not FTP;
        9c. "options no-recursion" and "limit transfers-per-ns 1".
        (Equivalences for non-bind servers will apply!)

. Network and name server outages will be reported.
        10a. To the root admin and TLD admin lists whether scheduled or
             unscheduled.
        10b. via phone to the zone-master senior staff if the outage
             unscheduled or if the outage is to occur in less than 24 hours.
        10c. Extended outages may result in exceptional handling situations.

. Name server and its immediate infrastructure are on uninterruptable
    power supply.

. Address PTR points (only) to ?.root-servers.net, not a "local" name.
        (for root servers only! :)

Selection Criteria:

. serves max possible number of low-hopcount endpoints not otherwise served.
. credibly likely to continuously perform on qualification criteria for
   the duration of the operations contract.
. stable organization which is considered likely to survive and prosper.


Security considerations of this memo

   None.

Acknowledgments

   Constructive comments have been received from:
   Jon Postel, Paul Vixie, Michael Patton, Andrew Partan, Michael Dillon,
   Don Mitchell Steven Doyle, Owen DeLong and other members of the internet
   community.

Authors' Addresses

        Bill Manning
        USC/ISI
        4676 Admiralty Way
        Marina del Rey, CA. 90292
        01.310.822.1511
        bmanning@isi.edu
--