[92009] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Spain was offline
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Thu Aug 31 08:51:30 2006
In-Reply-To: <OFB7F8C38B.DF1EA247-ON802571DB.00329991-802571DB.0032BE43@btradianz.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
From: Joe Abley <jabley@ca.afilias.info>
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 08:50:29 -0400
To: Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 31-Aug-2006, at 05:13, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:
> Do you have your own mirrors of TLDs that are
> important to your users, i.e. .com, your .xx
> country domain, etc.?
You seem to be suggesting that ISPs run stealth slaves for these
kinds of zones. This may have been a useful pointer for ISPs in days
gone by, but I think today it's impractical advice.
ccTLD managers these days either already restrict zone transfers for
privacy reasons, or are being encouraged to do so as a matter of best
practice. Established gTLD zones like COM are sufficiently large and
are updated so frequently that even if they were made available for
AXFR the chances are good that most ISPs would struggle to host the
zone, and any local instance would provide degraded service to their
customers instead of the improvements in performance that presumably
were the point of the exercise.
Even where zone transfers are available and ISPs are able to run
stealth servers there is always the risk that master server ACLs (or
the master servers themselves) will change without warning, leaving
the stealth slave serving authoritative but stale data, which is
guaranteed to make the helpdesk phone ring sooner or later.
For zones that are being made available on anycast servers, ISPs may
be able to lobby/pay the zone operator to install an anycast instance
in their network. However, in general, the days of ISPs being able to
set these things up on their own and see benefit from them are past,
in my opinion.
Joe
