[discuss] rootservers

Mon Feb 24 16:19:45 UTC 2014

At 11:42 24/02/2014, David Conrad wrote:
>Elisabeth,
>
>On Feb 24, 2014, at 12:10 PM, Elisabeth Blanconil <info at vgnic.org> wrote:
> > Here is the distribution of the 365 top zone name servers (root servers)
>I suspect creating a new term for the root name servers is unlikely 
>to be helpful to anyone.

David,
We are not specifically interested in the way servers call 
themselves. We are interested in servers where IUsers can find 
identified information on the top zone. Identified information means 
that the information collection and dissemination policy are 
reasonably documented, consistent and stable. And made plainly 
available to the IUsers.

> > made available by the two VGNICs I know of (ICANN/IANA and ORSN).
>What's a "VGNIC"?  I presume it is not the Network Information 
>Center for the British Virgin Island (a la JPNIC, CNNIC, KRNIC, TWNIC, etc).

You may have noted that this is my organisation.You are free t to 
access our under development site: http://vgnics.net. I accept that 
the VGNIC concept fosters competition (cf. ICANN by-laws) in the name 
space and that you may wish to comment it. Your experience as a the 
largest so far VGNIC manager could be precious to the community.

However, I must say that due to our limited resources we focus on the 
EZOP (exploration of the primary zone map) and the subsequent 
HomeRoot experimentation project. My "rootservers" list isthe 
preparation of an input to EZOP. ORSN documents the IPs of all its 
machines, not the RSSAC. This might be embarrassing in case of 
necessity and/or local limited access (islands, earth breaks, wars, 
social events, power shortages, tsunamis, etc.) or update/political 
discrepancies.

Steve Crocker's remark about access surety and delays to TLD's name 
server is of the essence. However, rather than being business 
oriented like ICANNers advocating .com TNCs registry duplication 
(they might afford the cost) we are interested in supporting free 
registration for local emergency services. Local replication of the 
national TLD name servers, as well.  We documented that we will want 
to support HomeRoot TTLs as TTRs, i.e. "time to resurect" if access 
to the TLD nameserver was not possible.

> > They are broken down per countries as follows:
>A graphical representation of root name server instance distribution 
>can be found at: http://www.root-servers.org
>(Note that the location of the "B" root name server instance is not 
>in the South Atlantic just off the coast of western Africa (Lat: 0, 
>Lon: 0), but in Los Angeles, US).

Thank you for this information. That is far more precise than the 
"earth" entry by the ROOT-B manager. This increase the number of US 
located top zone name servers to 70.

>It might also be useful to observe that a common technique at larger 
>ISPs and other resolver operators is to mirror the root zone into 
>their resolvers, thereby removing the need of those resolvers to 
>actually query the root servers.  As such, those resolvers could be 
>considered to be a form of root name servers as well. Of course, it 
>is a bit challenging to identify which resolvers actually do this mirroring...

Correct. Hence the VGNICS criteria about information collection and 
dissemination policy being reasonably documented, consistent and 
stable, and made plainly available to IUsers.
Best
Hebe