DNSMON to Become Production Level Service from March 2005

[Apologies for duplicates]

Dear Colleagues,

The RIPE NCC DNS Monitoring Service (DNSMON) provides a comprehensive, 
objective and up-to-date overview of the quality of the service offered by 
high-level Domain Name System (DNS) servers. It is an active measurement 
service. It uses our Test Traffic Measurements (TTM) network to provide an 
up-to-date service overview of certain DNS root and Top-Level Domain (TLD) 
name servers. An important feature is the ability to view historical data. 
This allows the rapid analysis of both past and present DNS issues.

The service is available through its own website at:

    http://dnsmon.ripe.net

Development of the service started in 2003. During the development phase, 
we offered the service free of charge to the entire Internet community. 
This will change on 1 March 2005. On this day, the service will become a 
regular production service and the following will change:

- The RIPE NCC will start to charge a service fee to the administrators of 
the TLDs using DNSMON. This is a request from the RIPE NCC membership, in 
order to recover the costs of offering the service.
- We will continue to offer the service free of charge to users of the TTM 
service.
- Access to the data on the public website will be delayed by two hours 
from 4 April 2005.

What you should do:

1. If you are the host of a Test Box for the TTM service, you need take no 
action. Data collection will continue and plots will be available from the 
website at:

       http://dnsmon.ripe.net.

2. If you are the administrator of a TLD, we will send you a separate 
e-mail telling you what steps to take.

3. If you are a member of the public using the data on the DNSMON web site 
you need take no action.

DNSMON measures DNS performance between sites that take part in the TTM 
service and those where DNS servers are installed. If you are a network 
operator interested in the performance between your site and the DNS 
servers, you should consider installing a test box at your site.

You can find out more about this at:

   http://www.ripe.net/ttm

In recent months, several users suggested additional features for this 
service. We have noted all suggestions. As soon as we have finished setting 
up contracts for this service, we will look at the suggestions and come up 
with a possible implementation scheme. We will post this on the DNSMON 
Mailing List.

If you have any questions, please reply to this e-mail.


Kind regards,

Henk Uijterwaal
RIPE NCC