Mark Elkins - The DNS Guy

Mark was born and educated in the UK. He attended Queen Mary College (London University) from 1979 to 1983. From that very first day at university – Mark has been working on Unix based computer systems. He moved to South Africa in 1984.

After twelve years at Olivetti Systems and Networks, he started his own company (Posix Systems – an Internet Service Provider) and has been involved in Computer Communications since 1986.

He acquired the administered of the “CO.ZA” Domain name administration system on behalf of UniForum S.A. from 1995. Today, the CO.ZA Domain has over a million Domain Names and is by far the largest Domain in Africa.

He is a share holder in DNS.

Achievements include

• CCIE (Cisco Engineer) No.1992, 6 June 1996
• Running IPv6 at Posix Systems since January 2007
• DNSSEC at Posix Systems since 2010
• IPv6 based presentations at the 2009 IGF
• Chair Person of the South African IPv6 Task force committee
• Member of the IoD (Institution of Directors) 2011
• Past Board member of AFRINIC
• Currently an AFRINIC ASO-AC representative
• ICANN DNSSEC Program Committee Member

By being involved with the ZACR (South African Central Registry), Mark provides DNS (and DNSSEC) training to ISP’s in South and Southern Africa, courses which are usually every six month for the past ten years.
Mark is also involved in the DNSSEC management of the local ccTLD’s domains, such as ZA, CO.ZA and of the gTLD’s that are run locally, that is, Durban, Capetown and Durban.
Mark is currently involved as the technical leader in the ICANN project – a DNS Study of Africa (dnsafrica.study) – to collect statistics of all African ccTLD Domains.
Mark is (or was) also involved with SAFNOG (Southern African NOG), ISOC, AfNOG, AfrISPA and AfPIF.
He is a Board Member of COZA-Cares, a non-profit organisation that is involved with ICT in Schools.

Marks hobbies include SCUBA Diving. He is a NAUI Dive instructor.

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