[81960] in North American Network Operators' Group
The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse (was Re: Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jay R. Ashworth)
Fri Jul 8 15:17:08 2005
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2005 22:32:52 -0400
From: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20050703215925.J73284@sprockets.gibbard.org>; from Steve Gibbard <scg@gibbard.org> on Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 10:20:13PM -0700
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 10:20:13PM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, Mark Andrews wrote:
> >> Do I need to modify our cache server configuration to
> >> enable it?
> >
> > Only if you wish to do all your other customers a disfavour
> > by configuring your caching servers to support a private
> > namespace then yes.
>
> There's no particular technical magic to the ICANN-run roots, except that
> it's what just about everybody else is using. This means that if you
> enter the same hostname on two computers far away from each other, you're
> probably going to end up at the same place, or at least at places run by
> the same organization. This standardization is valuable, so anybody
> trying to make a different standard that isn't widely used compete with it
> is going to have a hard time convincing people to switch.
>
> That doesn't mean a competing system wouldn't work, for those who are
> using it. They'd just be limited in who they could talk to, and that
> generally wouldn't be very appealing.
Well, Steve; that reply is a *little* disingenuous: all of the
alternative root zones and root server clusters that *I'm* aware of
track the ICANN root, except in the rare instances where there are TLD
collisions.
I'm not aware of any such specific collisions; I stopped tracking that area
when NetSol shutdown that mailing list without warning several years
ago. I merely observe that they're possible.
> A system that would limit my ability to talk to people in other countries
> doesn't sound very appealing to me. On the other hand, the Chinese
> government has been trying hard to limit or control communications between
> people in China and the rest of the world for years. In that sense,
> maintaining their own DNS root, incompatible with the rest of the world,
> might be seen as a considerable advantage. If they don't care about
> breaking compatibility with the DNS root the rest of the world uses, the
> disadvantages of such a scheme become fairly moot.
Eric Raymond, that polarizing ambassador for open source, likes to
disseminate the word (and concept) "conflating" -- that being the
habit, or attempt, by an arguer of a point to hook together two related
but distinct concepts that may both be involved in a topic, but may not
have the cause and effect relationship being implied by said arguer.
This is a good example, IMHO: Even if China *did* maintain their own
root, unless they also maintained their own copies of the 2LD's, like
.com, they couldn't snip out *specific* sites they didn't want people
to see.
But the whole "there's a non-ICANN root: the sky is falling" thing is
an argument cooked up to scare the unwashed; us old wallas don't buy
it. I just hope none of the unwashed *press* decide to blow the lid
off of it; the public's lack of understanding of the underpinnings of
the net is painful enough now...
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com
Designer +-Internetworking------+----------+ RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates | Best Practices Wiki | | '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA http://bestpractices.wikicities.com +1 727 647 1274
If you can read this... thank a system administrator. Or two. --me
