Developed in collaboration with the Swedish registry (InternetStiftelsen), Zonemaster is positioned to become the DNS verification reference tool.
Made available to the community and developed as free software https://github.com/zonemaster, is used by the two registries to replace their historic tools (ZoneCheck for AFNIC, DNScheck for IIS) in their business processes.
Context
All domain name registries have developed over time DNS verification tools, but each made these applications to meet specific needs (benchmarks, pre-delegation testing, production statistics, analysis of the TLD zones managed by them ...). With the evolution of the DNS related technologies, developments costs become consistent and it is clear that it is almost impossible to use and/or integrate a tool developed by a counterpart in the absence of common specifications for tests and interfaces.
Genesis
At CENTR Salzburg in February 2012, Danny Aerts (CEO of IIS) proposes Mathieu Weil (CEO of Afnic) to launche a collaborative project between IIS and AFNIC and the intent was to develop a DNS verification tool, combining the best features of ZoneCheck and DNScheck by pooling our efforts and experiences. The first meeting between the two teams on this subject took place on October 1, 2012. A second meeting was held in the margins of CENTR Jamboree in Amsterdam in June 2013. The launch meeting for the project was held in the premises of AFNIC on 7 and 8 October 2013.
On 3 February 2015, the first release of Zonemaster is officially unveiled.
Implementation
Available in free software, Zonemaster can be used via a web interface or http://www.zonemaster.net/ from the command line. Interested stakeholders can also download all the components of the Zonemaster project (http://github.com/zonemaster) with their own databases. The Zonemaster web service is currently available in English, French and Swedish.
Although stable and usable as it stands, the project is nonetheless alive. The ambition is to meet the needs of various clients, requests for changes, features, bug fixes and all this is currently done through the platform GitHub. The development team (from Afnic and IIS) is in charge of the maintenance of the project and the objective is to provide quick answers to requests made from users internally or externally.
To go further in the definition of a “reference solution”, a separate initiative is proceeding to specify all the tests that is needed to be perfomed by a DNS verification tool such as Zonemaster. This initiative ("Testing Requirements Task Force" -TRTF-) is currently limited to CENTR members and the eventual focus is to evolve and involve the DNS community and write one or more RFCs based on this work.
