root zone file

Sun Apr 28 15:08:46 UTC 2002

> Replacing the hints file with the top level zone speeds up lookups,

nope.  there are less than 300 top level delegations, and a proper
caching implementation will only hit the roots once a week per tld.

> and removes the burden from the root servers:

wrong again.  (consider the impact of all those axfr's, from millions
of name servers, whenever the root zone changes.)

but what it _will_ do is add one more config file which contains a
dotted quad that might have to change some day.  every few years a
root name server is added or moved.  everything is fine as long as
there is _some_ overlap between your hints and the truth.  but it's
a whole lot easier to automate the change tracking for a hints file
than for something that tries to make every one of millions of name
servers into stealth slaves of the "." zone.

i've set the reply-to to namedroppers, since this is really not a
north american operations issue.