Summary

  • ICANN says Hugo Salgado of NIC Chile led the Latin American DNS Observatory and presented its first report when the project launched in 2016.
  • The Observatory tracked practical DNS characteristics, while Salgado's 2019 account distinguished public regional findings from detailed information available to each participating TLD about its own zone.

“Resilient DNS” sounds splendid on a conference slide. Hugo Salgado's more troublesome question was what, exactly, one would count. The Latin American DNS Observatory launched in August 2016 at a regional forum in the Dominican Republic. ICANN named Salgado, then at NIC Chile, as its leader and first-report presenter. The project turned an aspiration into a list of things operators could inspect.

That list has texture. ICANN's project account describes counting DNS servers per domain and the number and diversity of autonomous systems behind those servers. It includes server health, selected security properties, and penetration of IPv6 and DNSSEC. A domain with several server names all living behind one network may look plural on paper; network diversity asks a sharper question. The point is to give a regional discussion observable inputs.

In his 2019 technical presentation to LACTLD, Salgado separated two words often poured into the same glass. Resilience concerns recovery after an outage. Robustness concerns surviving heavy load, attacks and other abnormal events. The Observatory's design also kept a history, making change over time part of the evidence. Its roots included earlier studies of the .CL domain, multidisciplinary design and development at NIC Chile.

There was a useful division of visibility. ICANN said the Observatory published reports for the public. Salgado's slides said each participating top-level domain would also receive detailed data about its own zone. The regional view could focus attention on shared practices; the operator could investigate its own configuration. That is a better bargain than a single grand score that tells everyone very little.

The same slide deck listed prototype completion, quarterly collections, a relaunch within LACTLD and more zones as next steps in 2019. Those are a work plan in the original record. Salgado's LACNIC author biography places the Observatory among his regional projects and describes his DNS measurement work at NIC Chile through 2023. His contribution here was to make the machinery worth looking at, regularly and with enough detail for its operators to act.