European DNS Culture and Folklore

During the week from April 13th to April 20th we cached in our site almost all the european zone files and ran an extensive analysis of this data. This allowed us to obtain some conclusions about the most usual errors, as well as some interesting results about the several ``cultures'' used by DNS administrators in the different countries, etc. In this section we are going to present those results as well as some of the most ``curious'' or more meaningful facts we faced during our analysis. Some of those results take the form of statistics tables.

The results presented show the ``state of the european DNS'' in the night of April 13th to 14th.

The analysis shows that, generally, DNS administrators follow the options taken by the top level domain administrator of their own country or by the administrators of the most known domains. This proves that there is a path for knowledge dissemination among administrators leading to the dissemination of ``regional'' habits. For example, it is possible to use several management policies to guarantee the serial number growth (See Table 4). In general, this option is relatively uniform within the same country.

Another curious fact is related with SOA timers. In average south European countries are using higher values. This probably means that price and quality of communications in those countries have been worse than in the north European countries.

As it is generally known, Germany is the champion in the size of host names. The first 200 longer european host names are all below the ``de'' domain! Curiously, Italians win in the shortest host name (``it'' with the address 131.114.1.30).

Several information, like number of hosts, domains, zones, etc. per country are presented in Table 2. The first three columns are respectively number of zones, domains and hosts per country. The fourth is the total space used to store zone files. Fifth, sixth and seventh columns combine the first three ones, i.e., average domains per zone, average hosts per zone and average kbytes per zone file for each country. The two last columns indicate the average of zone names depth and depth of the biggest zone name.


Table 2: Several data per country (1992, April the 14th)

  Zones Domains Hosts Kbytes Domains Hosts Kbytes Depth-Zone
          Zone Zone Zone Avr Max
AT 99 150 4345 459 1.5 44 4.6 3.65 5
BE 15 187 1043 133 12.5 70 8.9 3.53 4
BG 1 7 0 3 7.0 0 3.0 1.00 1
CH 37 218 13367 1143 5.9 361 30.9 2.00 3
CS 4 32 177 15 8.0 44 3.8 2.00 3
DE 651 2316 38376 4737 3.6 59 7.3 3.00 5
DK 64 241 2319 353 3.8 36 5.5 2.38 4
ES 120 393 3086 330 3.3 26 2.8 2.05 3
FI 108 346 14493 1147 3.2 134 10.6 2.56 4
FR 254 427 16024 1643 1.7 63 6.5 2.48 4
GR 41 49 541 109 1.2 13 2.7 2.51 3
HU 2 8 5 4 4.0 2 2.0 2.00 3
IE 16 64 515 87 4.0 32 5.4 2.31 3
IL 26 42 2552 148 1.6 98 5.7 3.31 4
IS 6 10 285 22 1.7 48 3.7 2.33 3
IT 127 317 3947 1627 2.5 31 12.8 2.88 4
NL 230 529 14583 1578 2.3 63 6.9 2.94 4
NO 243 357 12808 1037 1.5 53 4.3 2.65 4
PL 31 37 324 74 1.2 10 2.4 2.94 4
PT 43 48 1158 114 1.1 27 2.7 2.31 3
SE 262 1803 18836 2200 6.9 72 8.4 2.79 6
SU 1 105 0 12 105.0 0 12.0 1.00 1
TN 2 3 8 6 1.5 4 3.0 1.50 2
UK 191 1027 24371 2463 5.4 128 12.9 3.60 5
YU 2 18 13 7 9.0 6 3.5 1.50 2


Next sections present several more results for some other aspects.



Subsections