Summary

  • Anand Buddhdev and Paul de Weerd proposed retiring ns.ripe.net, a RIPE NCC secondary reverse-DNS service dating from 1992; large allocation holders had special access while failures in provisioning, transfers and zone size made it costly to operate.
  • After DNS Working Group feedback, new ns.ripe.net delegations stopped in June 2024. RIPE NCC contacted users and removed the remaining database nserver attributes on 15 January 2025.

A spare key that became a permanent job

There is a particular kind of institutional kindness that starts with a spare key and ends with a room nobody can close. Since 1992, RIPE NCC had offered ns.ripe.net as a secondary nameserver for reverse DNS zones of members holding large address allocations: at least a /16 in IPv4 or a /32 in IPv6. If a member's own servers failed, the registry's server could keep that reverse DNS zone answering. For its time, it was practical.

By 2024, Anand Buddhdev, a RIPE NCC engineer responsible for DNS operations, and contributor Paul de Weerd made the case for retiring that favour. Their RIPE Labs account reads like an inventory of costs that had escaped the original bargain. The large-holder eligibility rule already looked awkward when smaller operators were arguably less able to run diverse DNS. An old database bug had let some undersized allocations into the service; those older delegations survived after the bug was fixed, while newer small holders could not enter. RIPE NCC also supplied a free service in a market served by some of its own members.

The operational bill was less philosophical. Some members had forgotten to permit zone transfers to RIPE NCC. Their zones then failed to load, and ns.ripe.net answered SERVFAIL. The setup did not support a shared TSIG secret for transfers. A member could add very large zones without RIPE NCC knowing their size in advance; at least once, that exhausted RAM on smaller servers. A malformed DNSSEC state could even make the pre-delegation checks reject the operator's attempt to repair a domain object without RIPE NCC intervention. A backup service that cannot reliably back up is a fairly elaborate way to collect support tickets.

Buddhdev's team had floated retirement in 2016 and heard a different answer: keep it. In 2024 the proposal went through the DNS Working Group again. The revised schedule closed new and updated ns.ripe.net requests in June, followed by months of contact with users. Buddhdev's October 2024 DNS update shows how unglamorous that handover was: email to zone, technical and administrative contacts, then address-space contacts when the first messages missed people, plus phone calls to larger users. More than 1,000 domain objects still needed attention in October.

The RIPE NCC's January 2025 member update says the service was sunset and all remaining nserver attributes naming ns.ripe.net were removed on 15 January. Buddhdev's May 2025 presentation records community support and the same completion date. The registry still operates authoritative DNS and reverse delegation; this was the retirement of one optional secondary service. Buddhdev's story is the less photogenic side of engineering leadership: turning a service off carefully, with the people who depended on it still in the room.

RIPE originals