Just got on this thing (perhaps very belatedly) - root server trouble?

Wed Feb 19 00:17:54 UTC 1997

> At 5:23 PM 2/18/97, Karl Denninger wrote:
> [...]
> >BTW, churn is the right word.  Its taking anywhere from 5-10 *seconds* to
> >come back as NXDOMAIN on each request for those that fail to resolve, and
> >this is from the IANA roots.

> Churn shmurn.  Those domains are probably ones that have been paid for (to
> the InterNIC), but aren't yet being used.  Who's accessing those unused
> domains and doing all this needless churning?  We should find 'em and
> string 'em up.
> 
> Seems like most of the churning would be caused by spammers and testers
> like yourself.
> 
> I'd be interested in seeing actual machine statistics on how much
> performance degredation can be attributed to lack of responses.  Without
> those statistics, I can't see how the InterNIC fees aren't covering this
> scenario.

Well, RFC2010 specifies a latency of 5ms at 1,200 requests/second.  I can
guarantee you're not meeting that right now on any of the existing COM
servers.  I'm seeing five *SECOND* response times right now to get back 
an NXDOMAIN.

Lots of people hit non-existant domains.  The problem is that this is 
only a linear degredation problem for a while -- when working sets get into
the hundreds of megabytes (as they are for the COM tld servers right now)
degredation isn't linear any longer -- its far worse.

Pull 60% of the records off those servers and performance would improve by
far more than 60% -- it would probably cut average service times by at least
75%, and I wouldn't be surprised to see latencies drop by 90%.

> As was mentioned before, you shouldn't have to pay an ISP to have a domain
> name reserved.
> 
> Chris Russo

Why not?  You have to pay NSI!

If you're not going to *USE* the domain, why should you be able to register
it at all?  DNS names aren't things you bandy about - - they exist to
perform a translation function.

Tell me what the difference is between $50 a year and $100 a year?  Not
much.  You can't get away from the first, and I don't see what the big
deal is with the second, given the existance of the first charge.

And by the way, from the analysis that I've done, if you think $50 a year 
is bad from NSI wait until the IAHC's domains come online.  With the stats
that I have right now on bogus nameservers and domains I'm willing to bet
the *break-even* price for those new registrars is going to be closer to
$200 a year per domain -- not $50.00.

NSI is going to be the *LOW* price supplier under the IAHC proposal.  

You heard it here first.

And the only way to prevent *THAT* is to force free-market competition 
into the root level of the domain tree.

I think we can easily make a profit at half of NSI's fee ($25/year).  But
there's no way we can do it for $25.00 under the IAHC's plan with the
overhead and policy things they're mandating.  That's just on the *economic*
front.

Folks, we run the network (this *IS* NANOG, right? :-)  Let's start actually
running it for a change... DNS is one of those things that we ought to be
able to do right, and do in an open and competitive format.

--
-- 
Karl Denninger (karl at MCS.Net)| MCSNet - The Finest Internet Connectivity
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