[20795] in North American Network Operators' Group

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Re: root name servers

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Tue Oct 27 18:33:51 1998

Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 17:11:48 -0600
From: Sean Donelan <SEAN@SDG.DRA.COM>
To: noc@nso.org, nanog@merit.edu

noc@nso.ORG (Network Operations Center) writes:
>anybody knows the physical location
>of all root name servers, or a pointer ?

The precise physical location (e.g. room number and rack) of all
the root name servers is not generally available public information.
It isn't "classified" information in the military sense, but some
people get nervous nonetheless.  Anyone who has been around the Net
for a while will pick up that information eventually.

A list of the general physical location (e.g. city and organization)
can be found at <http://www.nic.mil/DNS/root-server.html>.  It isn't
precisely accurate, but I don't know if it is deliberate deception,
or just an Oops, close enough for government work.  It doesn't include
the more recent root-servers servers at LINX and WIDE.

However, as the last few attempts by NSI proved, geographic location
isn't as important as network topology.  Putting a GTLD name server
in London doesn't do any good if its network connectivity sucks.
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation

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