[44338] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: how many roots must DNS have before it's considered broken
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Simon Higgs)
Mon Nov 19 17:29:14 2001
Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20011119140458.0338d260@oak.higgs.net>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 14:27:56 -0800
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Simon Higgs <simon@higgs.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0111190456001.15640-100000@www.everquick.net
>
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At 05:21 AM 11/19/01 +0000, you wrote:
>Once we start down the slippery slope of "I'm a root too", how
>many different ad hoc DNS "universes" (for lack of better
>term) must we have before we decide that things are "broken"?
Two. That happened back in 1996 when the IANA TLD applicants began getting
their glue added to AlterNIC. Today lack of entry in the root has created a
dozen or so more alt.roots. Now people are beginning to notice the
consequences (i.e. the .US zone is now causing cache pollution outside the
legacy root since it's using the ICANN .BIZ name servers - and that .BIZ
isn't recognized by all the alt.roots).
But it's OK. Really. There's only one root. Honest. Except for this one,
which is being run with all the usual I* blessings:
http://www.isi.edu/otdr/
>Maintaining a single, authoritative root seems, IMHO, to be a
>Good Thing. Given multiple registries, namespace collisions
>would get ugly -- and, even in the absence of collisions, let us
>consider "reachability" issues.
That's the point. Getting the alt.root "universes" to cooperate is an
exercise similar to "cat herding", but it has to start somewhere.
Best Regards,
Simon
--
DNS is not a sacred cow that cannot be replaced by something better.
