ISNIC Requirements

Requirements for Contacts

For registration purposes, the following conditions must be met:

1. The contact information for domains' and nameservers' administrative, technical, and billing contacts must be true and complete.
2. Contact's e-mail addresses must be valid, and must be read, as all communication from ISNIC regarding the registration is via e-mail.

Requirements for Domains

Domains in the ".is" zone must meet the following requirements:

1. At least two active nameservers must be configured:
   1. All nameservers must meet the technical requirements
   2. All nameservers must serve consistent data for the domain (give the same responses to SOA and NS queries)
   3. All nameservers must be registered with ISNIC
2. SOA records must be correctly configured:
   1. Primary nameserver correctly named in the MNAME field.
   2. Working mailbox of responsible party in RNAME field.
   3. Times (refresh, retry and expire) according to RFC1912 (section 2.2) .
3. NS records must be correctly configured:
   1. NS records must match what is registered with ISNIC
   2. The TTL (time-to-live) for the NS records must not be shorter than 24 hours (86400 seconds).

Requirements for Nameservers

Nameservers hosting Icelandic domains (".is" domains) must comply with the following requirements:

1. Nameservers must be correctly registered in DNS (with A and/or AAAA resource records).
2. Nameserver names may only contain ascii letters, digits, hyphen and periods.
3. Nameservers must allow connection to UDP port 53, and to TCP port 53 as well (see RFC5966 ).
4. For nameservers within the ".is" zone, the following also applies:
   1. The hostname part of the nameserver's name may not be numeric only: i.e. 123.example.com is invalid.
      (See: RFC1035 , RFC1123 , RFC1912 ).
   2. The name of the nameserver must not be be a bare domain name, it must have a hostname part (e.g. hostname.example.net)
5. Nameservers must be correctly registered with ISNIC.

Misconfigured Domain Parking

If the monthly test reveals that a domain does not comply with ISNIC's requirements, the following Misconfigured Domain Parking is initiated:

1. Warning e-mails are sent weekly to the domain's contacts. First only the zone contact but eventually zone, tech and admin contacts and finally the registrant is added.
2. If the problem persists for 8 consecutive weeks, the domain is suspended: it is marked inactive in the registry and its DNS records are removed from the ".is" zone file
3. After the domain has been put on-hold it will be tested daily and activated if found to comply with the requirements.
4. After another 30 days the domain is moved to the ISNIC parking servers (the DNS server settings for the domain are changed).

If the domain setup is brought into compliance (issues are resolved) before the domain is transferred to the ISNIC parking servers, the domain will be re-listed in the ".is" zone automatically and no further action need be taken.

If the domain setup is brought into compliance (issues are resolved) after the zone has been moved to ISNIC's parking servers, then one of the domain's contacts will need to use this website to redelegate the domain to the correct name servers.