4.2.2. Administrative considerations

When some organization wants to control its own domain, the first step is to identify the proper parent zone, and get the parent zone's owners to agree to the delegation of control. While there are no particular technical constraints dealing with where in the tree this can be done, there are some administrative groupings discussed in [RFC-1032] which deal with top level organization, and middle level zones are free to create their own rules. For example, one university might choose to use a single zone, while another might choose to organize by subzones dedicated to individual departments or schools. [RFC-1033] catalogs available DNS software an discusses administration procedures.

Once the proper name for the new subzone is selected, the new owners should be required to demonstrate redundant name server support. Note that there is no requirement that the servers for a zone reside in a host which has a name in that domain. In many cases, a zone will be more accessible to the internet at large if its servers are widely distributed rather than being within the physical facilities controlled by the same organization that manages the zone. For example, in the current DNS, one of the name servers for the United Kingdom, or UK domain, is found in the US. This allows US hosts to get UK data without using limited transatlantic bandwidth.

As the last installation step, the delegation NS RRs and glue RRs necessary to make the delegation effective should be added to the parent zone. The administrators of both zones should insure that the NS and glue RRs which mark both sides of the cut are consistent and remain so.