NSI and competition to RIPE and APNIC

Mon May 12 16:49:55 UTC 1997

Since this is NANOG, I decided that some technical/numeric accuracy was good:

> Nowadays, taking annual fees into account, the number of parties owning
> thousands of domain names is dropping quickly.  Okay, so let's say it is a
> ten-to-one ratio (which it's not, I believe it is more like 1.5 to one) ...

1.2 million doesn't apply to COM, it appears to be the estimate of the
combined size of COM, NET, and ORG.  Last week when I measured it, COM
had 942952 delegations under it (that is, second level domains) but they
were served by only 54292 discrete nameservers.  (Note that DNS's anti-
aliasing is weak, and given BIND 8.1's virtual hosting capabilities it
is likely that those 54292 "nameservers" are running on some smaller
number of real live actual physical hosts.)

However, given the raw numbers the ratio is such that the mathematically
average nameserver has 17.36 COM zones delegated to it (which includes
master ("primary") and slave ("secondaary").)  Eventually I'll start doing
histograms so I can tell y'all what the mean is and how lopsided the figures
really are.  Suffice to say that 1.5 is the wrong number, and that 10 is
actually closer to the truth.