(Reference information regarding TBR registrations is on our
CA FAQ and our
TBR page.)
The January 2nd TBR run was a little different. CIRA changed the length of
the TBR window last July (I think) from 6 hours down to 15 minutes.
This was the first big drop since that date, and it caused
some issues.
As far as we know, the whole TBR process exists to stop the .CA registry
servers from being overloaded when domains are released.
During the TBR registration period, the registry enforces a "one domain
per 5 seconds" rule.
That puts an upper limit on how many domains can be processed in the
15 minute window (180 domains per registrar, or 360 for us since we
have two). Since we had over 600 unique domains ordered we
"overflowed" the TBR window and basically things broke. :(
Fortunately, we were watching, and started scrambling almost
immediately to figure out how we were going to get our orders
submitted ASAP. We did manage to complete approximately 100
registrations after the TBR window closed.
Unfortunately, there were
two main issues. The first is that we did not correctly honor our policy of
submitting the first order received, and we did occasionally submit
the wrong order (e.g. one which should have been considered
back-ordered). Very sorry about that! We had to move quickly and
the algorithm to sort and remove duplicate orders is a bit complex.
The second issue is that since these last 100 registrations were not
done through the normal TBR system, the default DNS servers were not
correctly set. We believe this is fixed, as we went back and manually
reviewed the orders and updated the DNS servers... but being a manual
process we may have made mistakes.
We will update our
procedures to handle this "overflow" situation, as we expect
it to happen again soon.
In case anyone wants the numbers. We did well. We successfully
registered 347 TBR domains, which is a little more than half of
the domains we wanted. When we ran our TBR report for the day (90 minutes
after the TBR run) 945 domains had been registered, which
makes our market share about 37% :). Our TBR business is diverse.
We registered between 1 and 66 domains for each of 22 different clients.
-Tom Brown, January 3rd, 2005.
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