Updates .be domain names will be delayed

The .be-registry (DNS Belgium) was, many years ago, one of the very first registries capable of instantly updating information in their nameservers. So if you registered a new domain name, it would instantly be ready to be found. Many other registries have, also until now, stuck to a system of putting updates in a queue and then publishing the new information every hour or every couple of hours. DNS Belgium is however now also the first registry to stop the instant updates and purposefully introduce a delay.

During this delay, the registry will carry out automatic checks to make sure the zone doesn’t contain errors. They learned the hard way that such a check might be needed. A couple of months ago a number of .be domain names stopped working due to a bug in BIND (the nameserver software used bij DNS Belgium). This bug has since been fixed, but to make sure a similar problem can no longer cause unexpected results, they will first check the validity of the complete .be zone before putting online the new information.

With over 1,6 million domain names in the .be zone, this verification takes about 30 minutes to complete. The delay will be introduced from March 24’th onwards.

The same verification will also be applied to .vlaanderen and .brussels. These extensions are managed by the same registry. But since in each of them there are less than 10.000 domain names to be verified, there will only be a couple of minutes of delay.