DNS anycast considered harmful (was: .ORG problems this evening)

Thu Sep 18 12:28:07 UTC 2003

On donderdag, sep 18, 2003, at 14:08 Europe/Amsterdam, Stephane 
Bortzmeyer wrote:

>> BGP is really bad at. DNS servers on the other hand track RTTs for
>> query responses

> BIND does it but what about Microsoft cache/forwarder? At RIPE 45 (you
> were there),

Was I???

> a talk by people at CAIDA showed that A.root-servers.net
> received twice as much traffic as the other root name servers since it
> is just the first one listed...

That's not good. But not an excuse. If MS is unable to fix this (how 
long did it take them to retire the FAT filesystem that was considered 
prehistoric by the late 1980s again?), BIND runs under Windows too...

>> (but I hope they're smart enough to keep some non-anycasted root
>> servers around),

> Who is "they"?

Not sure.  :-)

> Since there is no top Root Nameservers Authority, every
> root nameserver manager decides for himself (I assume they coordinate
> but I'm not sure and it's not the same thing). Unlike a TLD, there is
> no central decision for management of the root's name servers. So they
> can all decide independently to anycast.

Diversity is a good thing. But who to the root operators answer to 
anyway? Not to ICANN, I'm told.