Re: PAB Grass Roots Servers

From: John Charles Broomfield (jbroom@outremer.com)
Date: Mon Feb 02 1998 - 08:11:39 PST


> >It's just a variation on alternic. The main difference being
> >that your hints file needs to have several hundred entries vs
> >however many alternic had running root servers.
>
> My initial concern was about having to maintain the root zone and keep it up
> to date. The reason we all load the IANA root servers is because they dont
> change. ie simple to manage.

I would agree on the problem on having to maintain the root zone.
For names to resolve, you have to have an up-to-date list of servers
which to interrogate. The problem is always size and managing.
Initially this was the infamous "hosts.txt" file. In todays environment
this file would be referencing probably around 20 million hosts (and so
have
around 20 million entries).
Go up a couple of levels and try and resolve directly SLDs, and you will
have maybe 8 million entries in your file (say a total of 3 million SLDs
worldwide and an average of just over 2 nameservers each)
Go one step further up (as proposed by the grass roots) and you're
"only"
taking care (with the current status-quo) of around 200 country code
TLDs
and the other 7 (COM/NET/ORG/GOV/EDU/MIL/INT). All these in general DO
have
more than the 2 nameservers that most COM SLDs have, so (my guess) we
would
be looking at something over 1000 lines.
Go up one further step, and you're at the current situation where you
have
delegated everything to a root, and with the curren situation it's 13
lines.
hosts.txt: 20 million?
SLDs: 8 million
TLDs: 1000
root: 13

Fortunately, the root doesn't often change which servers are feeding and
where
they are (though we may see some changes soon). Of course, I mean the
IANA root. If a TLD does on average ONE change per year (say add or
subtract
a new nameserver or maybe change IP address of one of them), then that
means
we've got over 200 changes per year to do to that grass roots server
file.
I personally prefer to trust management of those changes to something I
trust,
like the present IANA. Of course, should things change, then we would
probably
be forced to author our own root. This would mean that things would be
considerably less up to date than with the current situation (I can't
honestly
see system manages all over the world changing their root file
systematically
every week on a manual basis, because remember that if you just
automatically
delegate the creation of that file to someone and automatically download
it
from them without taking decisions yourself, then your really just
delegating
the root to whomever you're taking the file from, so you're in fact back
to the
current scenario...).

Yours, John Broomfield.



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