I have been playing around with the old update journal in the saveroot repository, to see if I can reconstruct root zones between July 2005 and March 2014.
https://github.com/fanf2/saveroot/ David Malone reminded me that I got the journal from him when I mentioned saving the root zone in a git repository, so thanks are due to him for this part of the history. https://twitter.com/dwmal1/status/441339653044461568 I think reconstruction is mostly feasible, but it would be super helpful if anyone can give me a copy of the root zone from any point in that time period to fill in a couple of gaps. There are a few gotchas that I have found. Firstly, names in the journal change from upper-case to lower-case part-way through, which makes matching records mildly inconvenient. The change coincides with the zone being (experimentally) signed in April 2010. I think I will not preserve this in the reconstrucred version: the case change has the disadvantage of making diffs less useful, and it's easy enough to recover the historically accurate upper case because the switch-over time is so obvious. Secondly, very stable records don't appear in the journal. For example, the NS RRsets for the root itself and for .com have not changed for many years. There are 785 records that appear in my first full copy of the root zone, but not in the journal. I think this is fairly straightforward to cope with. Thirdly, there's a gap between the end of the journal and the first full copy of the zone. I thought the gap was a couple of days, but on closer inspection it turns out the last serial number in the journal is 2014030500 and the first complete zone is 2014030501. Normally this would be ideal, but it turns out there were some actually meaningful changes in that update. The list below has records that appear in the journal but not in the 2014030501 zone. This is mostly simple to deal with, except for the .mk delegation change, in particular kitka.marnet.net.mk. It looks like that was a long-lived name server, mentioned in NS and A records that predated the journal (so they don't appear). I can infer the NS record but not the A record. I cannot infer any NS records that were stable for the entire lifetime of the journal and deleted in the 2014030501 update, which might be a problem for .mk and .ro (and less plausibly for other TLDs). . 86400 IN RRSIG SOA 8 0 86400 20140312000000 20140304230000 33655 . [...] . 86400 IN SOA a.root-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 2014030500 1800 900 604800 86400 co. 86400 IN DS 27859 8 1 63D2DAEB4D479BD4DFF4202D9BDC82B309C2CCD5 co. 86400 IN DS 27859 8 2 EF8F5B56FA9A79EF29A82330DB625BA19CE3A5B140B24287855DDAAA 03EA369B co. 86400 IN RRSIG DS 8 1 86400 20140312000000 20140304230000 33655 . [...] kitka.marnet.net.mk. 172800 IN AAAA 2a02:e48:0:3::2 kn. 86400 IN NSEC kp. NS RRSIG NSEC kn. 86400 IN RRSIG NSEC 8 1 86400 20140312000000 20140304230000 33655 . [...] la. 86400 IN DS 54086 7 1 C468E20FD427F2EB5E4658B1E1D24840768DC8E1 la. 86400 IN DS 54086 7 2 28339FCEDF2C52583595DD1460A6B07D9FA5692A5BA8E6E5F34EE306 35230541 la. 86400 IN RRSIG DS 8 1 86400 20140312000000 20140304230000 33655 . [...] lt. 86400 IN DS 24556 8 1 A9D06FA34F1C9D57062899824F5702041188DE97 lt. 86400 IN DS 24556 8 2 DEA1E077D98EA2DE8750281B40ACEBC14687AEB8FE49506333C903D5 01F6C620 lt. 86400 IN RRSIG DS 8 1 86400 20140312000000 20140304230000 33655 . [...] mk. 172800 IN NS ns2.arnes.si. mk. 172800 IN NS ns5.univie.ac.at. ns2.arnes.si. 172800 IN A 193.2.1.91 ns2.arnes.si. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:1470:8000::91 ro. 172800 IN NS ns-ext.isc.org. xn--90a3ac. 86400 IN NSEC xn--cg4bki. NS RRSIG NSEC xn--90a3ac. 86400 IN RRSIG NSEC 8 1 86400 20140312000000 20140304230000 33655 . [...] Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <d...@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ Tyne, Dogger: Westerly or southwesterly 6 to gale 8, decreasing 3 to 5 for a time in north. Moderate or rough. Rain or showers. Good, occasionally poor. _______________________________________________ dns-operations mailing list dns-operations@lists.dns-oarc.net https://lists.dns-oarc.net/mailman/listinfo/dns-operations