History of 4.2.2.2. What's the story?

Sun Feb 14 09:16:30 UTC 2010

I've wondered about this for years, but only this evening did I start
searching for details.  And I really couldn't find any.

Can anyone point me at distant history about how 4.2.2.2 came to be, in my
estimation, the most famous DNS server on the planet?

I know that it was originally at BBN, what I'm looking for is things like:

   How the IP was picked.  (I'd guess it was one of the early DNS servers,
         and the people behind it realized that if there was one IP address
         that really needed to be easy to remember, it was the DNS server,
         for obvious reasons).
   Was it always meant to be a public resolver?
   How it continued to remain an open resolver, even in the face of
         amplifier attacks using DNS resolvers.  Perhaps it has had
         rate-limiting on it for a long time.
   There's a lot of conjecture about it using anycast, anyone know anything
         about it's current configuration?

So, if anyone has any stories about 4.2.2.2, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks,
Sean
-- 
 Microsoft treats objects like women, man...
                 -- Kevin Fenzi, paraphrasing the Dude, 1998
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability