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Verisign Plans DNS Changes
NetWizard writes "According to a recent NANOG post and an InfoWorld story, 'Verisign will change the serial number format and "minimum" value in the .com and .net zones' SOA records on or shortly after 9 February 2004'. They seemed to have learned their lesson, from the post: 'There should be no end-user impact resulting from these changes (though it's conceivable that some people have processes that rely on the semantics of the .com/.net serial number.) But because these zones are widely used and closely watched, we want to let the Internet community know about the changes in advance.)'"
This announcement is important in that Verisign finally seems to recognize that they are part of a larger community, that those DNS records are not just some corporate asset sitting in a couple of computers in the corner.
Changes affect administrators around the globe. As part of a community, they have a responsibility to make their decisions transparent to the community, and to announce changes well-enough in advance that those who are affected have time to prepare.
This is not just a Verisign issue. The need for major Internet organizations to recognize the larger public as important stakeholders within the community is important. Awareness of the larger community should be followed by communication and actions that reflect that awareness, thus signalling a willingness to truly be a part of that community.
Verisign seems to be exhibiting a newfound awareness of community that ICANN seems to have abandoned.
I hope Verisign continues to be a good memeber of the community. Perhaps others can follow their lead.
------- "One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people." -- G. KHAN
How the hell will this be a pain in the ass? Any software that relies on .com's serial number remaining static is broken and needs to be fixed. Complain to the software developers, as Verisign is not at fault this time.
The internet infrastructure should be managed and run by the community, and not driven by commerical proliferation of services offered to enhance a companies offerings. This change seems dubious at best, considering Verisigns previous efforts of domain sitting, which, would break applications lets ensure we keep them in their place.
2038 anyone?
I'm not someone at Verisign, but I am willing to suggest possible logic in this change.
The previous format, YYYYMMDDNN (where NN is an arbitrary sequence number), conforms to no standard but its own. The UNIX timestamp format is recognised by any date/time manipulation tool worth using, as well as being a standard (de facto or otherwise, I don't know). While switching format now is a PITA for those who have already written tools that work with it, it will make future development fractionally easier, as well as allowing more accuracy than could practically be used.
Then again, they could just leave things alone.
From Infoworld: But the company did allow that "processes that rely on the semantics of the .com/.net serial number" could be affected.
For example, companies that have created scripts to monitor domain change on .com and .net will almost certainly need to make changes to account for the serial number change..."The damage won't be catastrophic, but some DNS servers could stop receiving updates,"
And they are planning to do this next Feb 9? Isn't that like too little time for organizations to update their systems?
I don't trust Verisign... the fact that they control such an important database accesed by millions of people around the world really frightens me. They screwed it once, they can do it again.
They should have that power removed from them. It should be on another organization (i.e. a non-profit one) that better serves internet community.
The above isn't meant as an excuse, just an explanation as to why this will undoubtly break someone's something. Then you get back to the old 'change is good' but not if it causes trouble, then 'change is bad'[tm]. At some point we're going to have to make big changes to the infrastructure and things will break regardless of compatability. we might as well get used to it (though as always, having a decent explanation wouldn't be a bad thing[tm])
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I got your international standard right here.
YYYY-MM-DD and YYYYMMDD are both standards-compliant.
Seriously, if you've never heard of this standard, read up. Whenever I need to stick a date or a time on something in text form, I just do it the ISO 8601 way.