The Managed Zone Service (MZS) is being shut down, and its data content migrated to a commercial provider, Mythic Beasts. There will be no interruption to the service, but MZS users in institutions will need to make arrangements to retain management access to their zones.
What is changing?
UIS set up the MZS many years ago to enable institutions to purchase external internet Domain Name Service (DNS) domains (outside cam.ac.uk) and provide a federated interface to manage DNS data. Since then, this has become a commodity service and commercial offerings have surpassed the MZS in terms of cost, user interface and capabilities. The MZS interface and backend run on top of the Managed Web Service (MWS), which is being shut down at the end of October 2021. We’ve decided to migrate the MZS domains to a commercial provider rather than redevelop the MZS.
We chose Mythic Beasts for this service because we already use them to manage the registration of MZS zones, so there will be no need to transfer the zones to a separate registrar. The Mythic Beasts service offers a far more modern and powerful web interface to manage zone data, including a comprehensive API to enable programmatic changes. MZS users can choose to move zones to an alternative provider.
What do you need to do?
We’ll begin migrating existing MZS data over to the Mythic Beasts primary DNS service (https://www.mythic-beasts.com/domains) in mid-September 2021.
Initially, the data will be migrated into a UIS account to ensure continuity of service for DNS lookups. After this, MZS users will no longer be able to manage migrated zones in the legacy MZS interface (https://www.mzs.dns.cam.ac.uk). You’ll need to set up your own Mythic Beasts account that we can transfer the zones(s) to, so you can manage the zones directly.
We’ll contact owners of MZS zones using the email addresses registered in the MZS interface. Please make sure these addresses are up to date or forward messages to the appropriate contact when they arrive.
Further information
Further details are available at https://help.uis.cam.ac.uk/service/network-services/ip/mzs-migration.
Queries
If you have any queries please contact mzs-support@uis.cam.ac.uk.