DNS Lame Delegations: A Case-Study of Public Reverse DNS Records in the African Region

Abstract

The DNS, as one of the oldest components of the modern Internet, has been studied multiple times. It is a known fact that operational issues such as mis-configured name servers affect the responsiveness of the DNS service which could lead to delayed responses or failed queries. One of such misconfigurations is lame delegation and this article explains how it can be detected and also provides guidance to the African Internet community as to whether a policy lame reverse DNS should be enforced. It also gives an overview of the degree of lameness of the AFRINIC reverse domains where it was found that 45% of all reverse domains are lame.