History of 4.2.2.2. What's the story?

Joe Provo nanog-post at rsuc.gweep.net
Sun Feb 14 14:41:47 UTC 2010


On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 02:16:30AM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> I've wondered about this for years, but only this evening did I start
> searching for details.  And I really couldn't find any.
> 
> Can anyone point me at distant history about how 4.2.2.2 came to be, in my
> estimation, the most famous DNS server on the planet?

I don't think anyone else can help you determine your estimaation...

> I know that it was originally at BBN, what I'm looking for is things like:

4/8 was originally BBN. Anycasted DNS resolvers came to many networks 
somewhen 98-00 [I can't be more precise as my archive of 1994-2007
work and events is naturally out of my reach, being that employer's 
data].  But I seem to recall that was Rodeny's babye form the Genuity
days. 

>    How the IP was picked.  (I'd guess it was one of the early DNS servers,
>          and the people behind it realized that if there was one IP address
>          that really needed to be easy to remember, it was the DNS server,
>          for obvious reasons).
>    Was it always meant to be a public resolver?
>    How it continued to remain an open resolver, even in the face of
>          amplifier attacks using DNS resolvers.  Perhaps it has had
>          rate-limiting on it for a long time.

That is a question for folks at L3.  Any publicly-sharable data might 
be interesting presentation-fodder.

>    There's a lot of conjecture about it using anycast, anyone know anything
>          about it's current configuration?

Why "conjecture"?  Examining the /32s from inside and outside of 3356
clearly shows the whole set still is, and those who have been customers
or worked with the 3356 folks over the years know it has historically
been as well.

Cheers,

Joe

-- 
             RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE




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