[137474] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: quietly....
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Conrad)
Sun Feb 13 23:57:22 2011
From: David Conrad <drc@virtualized.org>
In-Reply-To: <4D587C35.10101@bogus.com>
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:57:12 -1000
To: Joel Jaeggli <joelja@bogus.com>
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Feb 13, 2011, at 2:49 PM, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
>> Ignoring historical mistakes, what would they be?
> gosh, I can't imagine why anyone would want to renumber of out =
198.32.64.0/24...
I guess you missed the part where I said "Ignoring historical mistakes".
> making them immutable pretty much insures that you'll then find a =
reason to do so.
The fact that ICANN felt it necessary to renumber into a new prefix is a =
perfect example of why having golden addresses for the DNS makes sense. =
If the root server addresses had been specified in an RFC or somesuch, =
there would be no question about address "ownership".
> There are plenty of cautionary tales to be told about well-known =
addresses.
As I'm sure you're aware, the DNS is a bit unique in that can't use the =
DNS to bootstrap. It requires a set of pre-configured addresses to =
function. Changing one of those pre-configured addresses requires =
changing the hints file in every resolver on the Internet which takes a =
very long time (I'm told that a root server address changed over a =
decade ago still receives more than 10 priming queries per second). It =
also means the former root server address is forever poisoned -- you =
don't want to give that address to someone who might use it to set up a =
bogus root server. It was hard enough when there were just a couple of =
DNS resolver vendors, now there are more than a few.
> assuming that for the sake of the present that we forsake future =
flexibility then sure golden addresses are great.
It isn't clear to me what flexibility would be sacrificed, but it is =
academic. Unfortunately, it'll likely take some traumatic event for the =
status quo to change.
Regards,
-drc
