eDNS - Temporary Freeze

Sun May 4 02:46:41 UTC 1997

Well, heck.  Karl sent me the same thing personally since he must have
figured my slocal would nuke his messages on the main nanog list.  I've
removed my slocal for the duration of various other emergencies, so I
got the pleasure of seeing this twice.

> >I take my root zone from the IANA.
> >Not NSI and especially not from stargate 0.
> 
> Really?

Yes, really.

> Explain this trace please.
> ...
>  7  netsol.bbnplanet.net (192.221.77.130)  31.580 ms  33.831 ms  29.229 ms
>  8  * * a.root-servers.net (198.41.0.4)  44.905 ms
> 
> netsol.bbnplanet.net is Network Solutions, Inc., otherwise known as NSI.

Yes, that's true.  I think you interpreted that trace correctly.  Exactly
why do you need my help?

> Nice try.

Um.  I don't know a lot of smaller words I could use to explain this but I
will try.

If IANA tells me to take my root zone from Stargate 0, then I will.  What
that trace is telling you is that a long while back, IANA asked the
InterNIC contractor (currently NSI) as well as the root name server
operators to publish its root zone.  We all decided that since InterNIC
publishes the COM, EDU, MIL, NET, ORG, ARPA, and GOV zones to the other
root name servers, we might as well publish the "." zone the same way.

Authority to make changes to MIL, GOV, EDU, and "." was not delegated to
the InterNIC contractor.  Last week the MIL folks let us all know that they
will be publishing the zone directly soon, for example.  Authority to make
changes to COM, NET, ORG, and IN-ADDR.ARPA _was_ delegated to the InterNIC
contractor.  However, IN-ADDR.ARPA is itself subdelegated to APNIC, RIPE,
and soon ARIN -- when the InterNIC contractor stops allocating IP address
blocks it will also cease to have authority to make changes in IN-ADDR.ARPA.

So you see, the top level domains published by the target of your traceroute
are not all owned by the organization who owns that target.  When the owners
of these domains say "change where you pull it from", the root name server
operators do so during their next scheduled maintainance interval.  The "."
zone is owned by IANA.  If the IANA tells us to fetch it from Stargate 9, we
will do that -- it makes no difference to us where we fetch it from.  We are
just server operators, we're just concerned about stuff like connectivity and
uptime and coherence.

Jim Fleming's so called "Root Server Council" is an insult to our intelligence.