SAC064 was published on 13 February 2014. All SSAC publications can be found at https://www.icann.org/groups/ssac/documents.
| Recommendation | Description | Current Phase |
|---|---|---|
| Recommendation 1: The SSAC invites all ICANN Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees, the IETF, and the DNS operations community to consider the following proposed behavior for search list processing and comment on its correctness, completeness, utility and feasibility. a. Administrators (including DHCP server administrators) should configure the search list explicitly, and must not rely on or use implicit search lists; Where DNS parameters such as the domain search list have been manually configured, these parameters should not be overridden by DHCP. b. When a user enters a single label name, that name may be subject to search list processing if a search list is specified, but must never be queried in the DNS in its original single-label form. c. When a user queries a hostname that contain two or more labels separated by dots, such as www.server, applications and resolvers must query the DNS directly. Search lists must not be applied even if such names do not resolve to an address (A/AAAA). Therefore www.server is always a FQDN. | CLOSED | |
| Recommendation 2 | The SSAC recommends ICANN staff to work with the DNS community and the IETF to encourage the standardization of search list processing behavior. | Phase 5 | Close |
| Recommendation 3A | In the context of mitigating name collisions, ICANN should consider the following steps to address search list processing behavior. A. Commission additional research studies to further understand the cause of invalid queries to the root zone and the significance of search list processing as a contributor to those queries. | DEFERRED |
| Recommendation 3B | In the context of mitigating name collisions, ICANN should consider the following steps to address search list processing behavior. B. Communicate to system administrators that search list behaviors currently implemented in some operating systems will cause collision with names provisioned under the newly delegated top-level domains. Such communication should complement the current ICANN effort in this area with findings and recommendations from this report. | DEFERRED |
