Dear DNS working group, Shane's explanation of the zonelet exchange system is correct. This system was adopted by the RIRs in the early days of resource transfers. The RIR with the majority of address space in a given IPv4 XXX/8 of address space is responsible for running the corresponding XXX.in-addr.arpa zone. If any of this address space is registered in another RIR, then the majority RIR needs to get delegation information from that RIR, and this is done by importing "zonelets", which are similar to zone files, and contain NS and DS records, and perhaps glue records for in-bailiwick name server names.
The original code for this at the RIPE NCC was indeed written in perl. However, that code is not in use any more. It has since been replaced with newer code, for a variety of reasons. However, it still produces and consumes zonelets for exchanging delegation information with other RIRs. The zonelet system is quite simple in many ways, and I can appreciate why it was chosen back in the day. However, it is pull-based, and so delegation information takes time to propagate. In the event of an error, it similarly takes a while before correct information can be republished. Shane mentioned the use of DNAME records, but I don't think it's the right solution for this case. DNAME records alias a name and everything below it to another name. But here, we don't quite want aliases. We just want the NS and DS records of delegations from another RIRs merged into the parent zone we operate. We are working with the other RIRs to look at the system, to see if we can make it more robust, and perhaps faster, so that delegation information can be exchanged more quickly, and in the event of errors, also corrected more quickly. Regards, Anand Buddhdev RIPE NCC
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