To apply for the service please use the web-based application form. If you are unable to use the web based application form, an e-mail could be sent on behalf of an organisation by a recognised Jisc contact to the Jisc Service Desk (JSD) at: help@jisc.ac.uk with the subject ‘Janet Primary Nameserver Service application for (name of organisation)’, using the application form template.

• Acknowledgment of applications

  Jisc will acknowledge receipt of your application within four working hours. If you have heard nothing after that time please contact Jisc Service Desk.

• Processing of applications

  Jisc will seek to set up the service within five working days of receiving your application. However, this is dependent on the detailed technical co-operation of other parties including yourselves.

• Configuration and Information changes

  Jisc will seek to make any changes you request to the configuration of your service within two working days, with the same reservations as those for the processing of applications to use the service.

Customers are reminded that this service is intended only for simple DNS information and that limits may therefore be placed on the number of requests for changes that a single customer may request in a given period. Urgent changes will, of course, be allowed if they are justified.

Due to the distributed nature of the DNS, frequent changes may in any case affect the stability and availability of the domain’s services and networks. This is because although the information in the primary and secondary nameservers will be updated daily, resource records are also held in caches on nameservers all over the Internet and these will not be updated until the resource record’s TTL has passed. Changes to DNS information may therefore take hours or days to reach all parts of the Internet.

Contacts

Jisc or its contractors may need to contact an organisation for various purposes such as:

• requests for urgent action in an emergency, in respect of some user activity
• routine announcements about the operation or use of the service
• notices about abnormal operation
• policy questions about the continued use of the service or escalation of unresolved requests.

As part of the registration process an organisation will be asked to provide an e-mail contact address for these purposes. This contact address may be, for example, an individual responsible for network and associated services, a functional address for the DNS service (provided this is read regularly by an appropriate person) or a helpdesk. It is a condition of the use of the service that requests sent to the contact addresses provided are responded to in a timely manner. Contact e-mail addresses will be included in a mailing list that the service managers may use for announcements. This mailing list will not be available to anyone except the managers.

In addition to the e-mail contact address, the name and telephone number of a person who can be contacted in emergencies must be provided.

The service operator will e-mail the contact address from time to time to confirm that the details held by Jisc are still accurate.

It is an Internet standard, set out in RFC1034/1035, that every zone should have a ‘hostmaster’ e-mail address to which questions about the zone may be sent. For domains that are hosted by this service, Jisc will publish a suitable e-mail address as part of the Start-Of-Authority (SOA) resource record for each zone. Mail to that address will be delivered to our service operators, who may pass it on to an organisation contact if they cannot answer it themselves. The hostmaster address is intended to receive messages about DNS information, but it is often used improperly to report other problems that appear to originate from the domain, for example e-mail abuse, viruses or hacking attempts. The organisational contact should be prepared to receive such messages and pass them on to the correct people within the organisation.