New Wizard for Setting up Reverse DNS

The RIPE NCC now provides a wizard for setting up Reverse DNS. The wizard replaces the form for creating RIPE Database objects manually, so when creating a new DOMAIN object you will be taken to it automatically.

A one-minute demo of the Reverse DNS wizard is online.

Requesting reverse delegation for your zones has always been notoriously error prone, causing more user errors and support tickets than the creation of any other RIPE Database object. In order to maximise ease of use and success rate, we implemented the following features:

• We present the user with a clear set of guidelines for the configuration of their name servers before starting the wizard
• Manually creating reverse zones is no longer necessary, as you can simply fill in a prefix and the wizard will do the rest
• Creating DOMAIN objects one by one is no longer necessary, as you can create up to 128 DOMAIN objects in one go
• We perform a basic check on the name server before the full set of tests is run, to maximise the chance of success

Please keep in mind that this is the first iteration of this functionality. We will now start gathering feedback and will run analytics to see how it can be improved further. For example, the current name server pre-checks are very basic and we can expand them in the future if needed. We are using Zonemaster for these checks and are in the process of migrating the full set of tests to this service. We'd like to thank IIS and AFNIC for their support.

Presentations from RIPE 73 regarding Zonemaster and the Reverse DNS Wizard are available online.