[rssac-caucus] Tweaks to RSSAC-002

[Ray Bellis]

On 31/08/2016 08:35, Shane Kerr wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I love RSSAC-002, but have had a few small pain points consuming the
> data that some of the root operators provide. I suggest that it might be
> good to make RSSAC-002bis to improve things.

We're already on v3 - is that the version you're reading?

<https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/rssac-002-measurements-root-06jun16-en.pdf>

> 1. It would be helpful if there was a standard starting URL for
>    these. I know section 4.7 defines the standard, but the starting
>    point is different with 5 different styles for 8 operators.
> 
>     'a': 'http://a.root-servers.org/rssac-metrics/raw/',
>     'b': 'http://b.root-servers.org/rssac/',
>     'c': 'http://c.root-servers.org/rssac002-metrics/',
>     'd': 'http://droot-web.maxgigapop.net/rssac002/',
>     'h': 'http://h.root-servers.org/rssac002-metrics/',
>     'j': 'http://j.root-servers.org/rssac-metrics/raw/',
>     'k': 'https://www-static.ripe.net/dynamic/rssac002-metrics/',
>     'l': 'http://stats.dns.icann.org/rssac/',
>     'm': 'https://rssac.wide.ad.jp/rssac002-metrics/',
> 
> 2. It would be nice if there was an SSL way to get the data everywhere.
>    I know it may be hard for Verisign to get a certificate since they
>    left the CA business, but we all have Lets Encrypt now. ;)

DNS-OARC is collecting all of the data for central aggregation.  I can't
tell from the site just now how access to that data is obtained.

> 3. Some operators seem to have stuff not defined by RSSAC-002 in their
>    directories. For example, several have PNG files in them, others
>    seem to have debugging or additional directories. It's not a big
>    deal, but naive scripts have to filter stuff out.

If you're parsing directory listings rather than asking for the specific
named files that you expect, you're doing it wrong ;-)

> 4. While RSSAC-002 says that frequency that reports are generated is
>    out of scope, everyone but L does it daily so maybe it could just
>    define that? Surely we can convince L to also generate daily?

v3 of the doc does now specify that the data is reported on a 24 hour
(UTC 00:00) basis.

> 5. Most importantly, every page says "Measurements of the Root Sever
>    System" at the top (s/Sever/Server/). Once seen, cannot be unseen.

And yet no one else saw it :p    Oops...

> As a related issue, it sure would be nice if the remaining root
> operators provided this information. Currently E, F, G, and I don't
> have links on the http://www.root-servers.org site to this information
> (I was surprised to see F and I missing, I admit). Maybe they have this
> somewhere else? How would I know?

F is "working on it" - since we don't use pcap for data collection we're
dependent on the forthcoming 9.11 release of BIND and the stats channel
(XML / JSON) which has new features to support RSSAC 002.

> Also, the web H site with statistics seems down right now. Maybe it
> would be helpful if ICANN mirrored the data? (That might actually solve
> my problem of inconsistent directories.)

See above.

Ray