root nameserver problems ?

Thu Jul 17 18:46:04 UTC 1997

Hot Diggety! Art Houle was rumored to have said...
> The shutdown of the root name servers is the shutdown of the internet!
> Take out 12 servers and you disable a multi-billion dollar industry (are
> you listening cisco, microsoft, intel, ....??) The only reliable
> protection of the internet from this weakness is to allow the free and
> open duplication by anybody of the full information in the root servers
> and in the whois database. 

Sorry, no dice. To stay somewhat within the charter, let me clarify what
NSI just announced, for the really clueless (operational issue):

Why? This specific situation was due to *corrupted* information being
propagated to the other root nameservers, not from any network failure or
physical (machine) shutdown, according to a recent NSI announcement on this 
topic.

So by pushing for wider dissemination, just doesn't really help if it's
corrupted information, and actually has potential to make things worse.
Besides, duplication by unauthorized parties may lead to data integrity
problems or loss of control over system, which could be a fatal blow for
the Internet as we know it today.

I would imagine you'd have to petition the IANA for this kind of thing - and
look how far the other alternative TLDs/registries has gotten in terms of being
IANA-sanctioned.

Now... I would imagine that root server issues would be of the highest
operational priority, for obvious reasons. So if there are known failures in
the system, they're promptly taken care of. (AFAIK) Maybe not always
*promptly* (as that recent snafu illustrated) but usually taken care of as
soon as a problem is brought to light.

I cannot speculate on how well prepared NSI is for a serious failure in their
database system that they would be unable to fix, because I just don't really
know anything about NSI's internal workings. Perhaps someone from NSI will
comment on this, but that's extremely unlikely.

Let's save the rest of this for com-priv or something? (We wouldn't want to
deprive the regulars there of meaty posts, now, would we? ;-) )

-Dan Foster
Internet: dsf at frontiernet.net

P.S. I *really* liked that MAE-Mir idea. I'm sure the Russians would really
appreciate a cash infusion that MFS/Worldcom would bring by buying co-lo space 
on Mir for this. ;-)