AfriNIC lame delegation policy implemented in its entirety

The African Network Information CEntre (AfriNIC) lame delegation policy has fully been implemented. In a newsletter to the community, AfriNIC CEO Eddy Kayihura announced that the centre began implementing the policy in April 2021 and by June, the DNS lameness tests were run daily from at least 3 geographical locations. Lame delegation tests involve querying domain name server (DNS) to check their responsiveness. Under the AfriNIC policy, a DNS is considered lame if: it does not respond to queries; responds, but not for the specific domain queried; or responds to the correct domain, but without the authority bit set.

Lame delegation is among ways for checking the health of the domain name system. Lame domains will be marked as such in AfriNIC’s WHOis database.