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Sun no Longer the "dot" in .com
An anonymous reader writes: "Sun's claim to fame, namely being the "dot" in .com in all their TV spots, has been snatched by IBM. Their E10000 which was serving as the A.Root server has been replaced by an IBM RS/6000 S80. " OK, it's not the most significant news, but it was just funny to see that title. ;)
...involving the phrase "Getting the dot, but missing the point."
I just can't think of it.
Damn.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
(from the NANOG mailing list:)
Date: 14 Apr 2000 20:04:52 -0700
From: Sean Donelan
To: tomn@netsol.com
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: RE: NetSol screwing the pooch?
[snip]
I'm a bit concerned when I read about a plan to install identical
servers, with identical configurations, with identical software,
connected to identical routers also with identical software and
configurations, operated by a single human point of contact.
[snip]
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Well, the ArpaNET started on PDP-10s, no doubt about it.
But hadn't the world pretty much gone to Unix by the time the Internet began?
D
----
Really, thought the same time. We just priced a E5500 with only 4 processors and 2gig and a shitload of disk and the total was $180k.
If you have a Starfire fo $80k, let me in on where to pick one up!
One Server to rule them
One Server to find them
One Server to bring them
And in the DNS BIND them
Say hello to zMac.
Well for a brief summary, look here. Briefly summazrized: roughly the same horses with half the cost and 1/3 the processors.
--sugarman--
Looks like after that they've decided to change to the "doh" in
[drum hit]
Hotnutz.com - Funny
Random Person-"you mind if i get a coke?"
Me-"That's not any ordinary fridge. that's a.root!"
Random Person-"huh?"
that would be fun. but seriously, what do they do with the ex-servers? i mean, no matter if it is an E450 or the E10000 the article claimed, that's still some serious power. it's funny when technology you could never afford in a million years gets deemed obsolete. maybe i'll get a big alpha-200 server or something for cheap and pretend it's a.root. or something. isn't it great to be geek?
He's describing the behavior of the registry, not of the root-servers themselves... what gives?
The root servers run bind, and server out names. Period.
The registry facilities (internic, formerly) are on a totally different system.
Not four servers.. a four processor e450.
And a quad processor e450 running solaris will eat you for breakfast.
Some compaq servers? If it's a quad alpha.. yeah...
but you can't beat solaris.
I dig sun... I love sun..
but you know.. some sun salesmen REALLY piss me off. VERY pushy. The worst thing you can do with me is get pushy.
I was wondering when you ancients were going to show up and start setting things straight.
;)
Oh.. thanks
I'm not sure why you used the analogy you did. In the event of a natural disaster, a piece of Big Iron is just as fallible as a PC. Depends on the disaster. The S80 could probabbly fare pretty well in an earthquake. I remember an add DEC use to run about their "High Availability" VAX/VMS systems. A picture of a machine room after an earthquake. Machines that had ripped the bolts out of the racks and were on their sides. The HA VAX had it's disk lights going, even with part of the machine in a pool of water (I assume from some thing else's cooling). The S80 could have a lot of it's CPU and memory boards unseated (or destroyed) and should keep on chugging (it might have to auto-reboot). No PC's I know of would. Unless you count the old Sequents as PCs just because they use 80386s and 80486s. This makes me curious -- what would happen if the root A server got totalled? What gets failed over onto? If the primary fails the secondarys can still give answers (I think secondaries can even give authoritatave answers in most cases). The failure would have to last days before a Bad Thing (other then excess load) happened. Check your /etc/namedb/root.cache for details.
Insert "Big Blue Dot" jokes here.
(Odd, too -- Sun's E10K, or "Starfire" box, kicks ass. Copious amounts of ass. I'm surprised they switched.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
..how could I have been so mistaken =P
Assuming you can figure out where they all are form the IP addresses in the root.cache file, and traceroute, or other similar tools, and maybe a bit of social engenering, it shouldn't be any harder then any other 12 randomly selected machines. (i.e. you may get unlucky and some are in phone COs and you need to get into a somewhat secure area, or blow through a lot of concrete in the internal walls behing the office bilding facade).
That wouldn't take out "the Internet", just much of name service. It would suck a lot. As caches started timing out things would start to suck a lot more.
However there are unoffical secondaries (not listed), and I assume other backup sets of the data. "All" that would be required would be to set up another root server (or 12), and route the old root serve's machine's IP address to the new ones. Wait less then five minutes for routing to converge, and all is right with name service again. Regretabably the loss of life involved in "12 explosions" would be far harder to "correct".
Beats me how long it would take to fix. If there is a real drill for it, maybe under an hour. If there is no drill for it, it could be much longer since the "12 explosions" probbably will cause lots of confusion.
The root servers are root-servers.net, so IBM can be called the dot in .net and Sun can still claim to be the dot in .com.
I felt someone had to stand up for AIX, cause well, it got me a job at one point, and you're the only one who will! `8r) but I still say I was dead on about the 'smit' crack. heh
As far as the a brand new IBM box beating a Solaris box.... that's not bad for a box that first started shipping in March 1997. It just got leapfrogged 3 years later for some odd reason... `8r)
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
I'm not sure why you used the analogy you did. In the event of a natural disaster, a piece of Big Iron is just as fallible as a PC.
Which is one reason IBM sells clustering solutions for just about everything they make.
This makes me curious -- what would happen if the root A server got totalled? What gets failed over onto? I know I should RTFM, and I will, but my Stevens books are at home.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I was watching the late evening business news on CNBC yesterday, and they interviewed the CEO, is it, of HP - the very sexy-looking lady, Fiorino, Carly Fiorino? Man, I'd like to be her personal assistant :) Anyway, the interviewer was asking about HP earnings, and the debut of the "new" MS-based PocketPC, and Ms. Fiorino also started in on Sun. Seems HP's got their server sites set on ol' Scott&Co. Big announcement that eBay replaced it's Sun's w/ HP's. Ms. F. said to look for future announcements in the same vein.
Guess Sun better check it's six, huh?
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
You can't put 'just' 4 processors in an S80, it comes in multiples of 6 up to 24.
The biggest advantage to an S80 is the price/performance ratio. The big disadvantage is that it has to be shut down when a CPU or a memory card fails. E10K's can hot swap CPUs and memory, but E450's can't...
Just clarifying.
Well, of course ! The whole reason it performs better is because of Linux. Imagine millions of Linux developers coding and sweating, saying "IBM is cool". Their effort then will naturally turn into CPU power, making all IBM CPUs magically run faster. The box itself doesn't have to run Linux (of course, it would be *at least* 10 times faster if it did).
It certainly is because of Linux. Anyone suggesting any other alternatives are deranged.
--
Last time i checked, RFC 882 put the dot in .com
There's plenty of load balancing among the root servers. If you have an adequately recent distribution of BIND (4.x+ will do fine), you have a hint file (named 'root.hint', or 'named.ca', or whatever) listing all of the root servers (I guess) and the original names. My 'root.hint' file lists 13 of them (from a.root-servers.net to m.root-servers.net).
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
just a note, in case anyone is wondering what I am talking about when www.ebay.com is shown to be running IIS by netcraft. They run IIS/NT for the pretty Frontpage stuff, but have a look at the guts of the site: search.ebay.com . That's running Zeus 3.3.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
Millions more names have been registered by competing companies and registrars outside the United States. Network Solutions will disclose exactly how many next week when it reports quarterly earnings.
cat
One dot, slightly used.
Known as the A.Root server, the big black IBM computer holds the authoritve files for matching domain names--such as www.marthastewart.com or www.yahoo.com--...
/. readers that are new to network hierarchy should get the facts.
Actually, this is not true. This server only translates the field directly before the TLD extension. That is, only yahoo.com and marthastewart.com are served. The www part is supplied by yahoo and martha's respective root servers.
I realize that the author of the article probably knows this, but did not include it in his article so my mother would understand, but I feel
Sludgie
and what's up with my tags being removed in the editing field when I preview? That's annoying.
Hey there..
Isn't it arguable that SRI & ISI put the . in
RFC830 put the . in
Then, a little later, RFC 881 defined the
domain name heirarchy.
And RFC920, an ISI publication "Domain Requirements" actually lays out the top level domain structure, seperating 'education' 'commercial' and 'government', i.e, the first definition of
So I'd say that RFC830 put the . later used in the RFC920 COM.
Oh well..
the "/" that you see between the top-level-domain of an address and its subdirectory is no longer being served by Slashdot
Slashdot has never been the slash between the domain and directory, slashdot is the second slash in http:// and as of March 18 of this year, it's the first slash in ftp://. A currently pending deal will make it both of the slashes in gopher://.
Cheap! Slightly used Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000 for sale. Like-new condition. Every home network needs one of these.
If you look at the Fortune 100 corporate web sites, 52% of them are running Solaris with various web servers. Now this is certainly flamebait to most /.ers, the runner up was Windows NT (2000) with 29%. Interesting fact: Linux only runs one of the Fortune 100 web sites.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Perhaps that's why IBM's revenues fell 5% from the same quarter last year, with most of their business segments showing flat or negative growth, while Sun hit a home run with their earnings report, showing record revenue of $4 billion, a 37% increase from the same period last year. Hey, no shame, IBM wouldn't be the first company ruined by pandering to the open source community (see SGI, Netscape, etc.)! :) Cheers,ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
IBM's drop in revenue originates in their consulting arm (IBM Global Services). It's nothing to do with their OS division - altho', given their current enthusiasm for Linux, that's probably about to change (think about it... the only way to make money on Linux is on yep, services).
from an inside Sun source at NSI:
1) There are no E10000 that were replaced .. there are no E10K servers at NSI. the old a.root-servers.net ran on an E450 (4proc) 4GB of Ram, and of those four processors their single-threaded bind process consumes 1.
2) a.root-servers.net is the top authoritative server for the .com, .net and .org zones and i think they also load the .mil, .edu, .gov, and .arpa on a.root .. that's it. The internal press release claims that they hold zones for all the ccTLDs (country-code specific Top Level Domains). This is incorrect, but they do point to the correct authoritative servers for each of the country codes.
suprising to find that much of NSI isn't aware of what exactly they do ..
Actually, this is not true. This server only translates the field directly before the TLD extension. That is, only yahoo.com and marthastewart.com are served. The www part is supplied by yahoo and martha's respective root servers.
Not even that is served from the root servers. All the root servers serve is IP addresses of the nameservers for the domain of the host being looked up, its up to the domains nameservers to deal out any actual IP's, including for their own domain.
You look up marthastewart.com, your nameserver asks one of the root nameservers where the nameservers for marthastewart.com is, it then asks them for the IP to marthastewart.com.
-- iCEBaLM
The rootservers are, as everyone who has ever edited a nameserver zone file knows, the dot in "com.", not in ".com" (which actually is ".com." and invalid without a proper 2nd leven domain).
Claus
Could this possibly have anything to do with the "hot property" domain mindset that means every acme.com also registers acme-widgets.com, acme-foo.com, and acme-bar.com, instead of using the DNS hierarchically as it was designed for by registering widgets.acme.com and so on within their own domain?
*One* Server holds the master file?
One server hold the master file, yes. That master file is mirrored among many other servers which are not only located in different parts of the country but also in different parts of the world.
No load balancing/[obligatory beowulf]/Round Robin? I would like to think there is some redundancy in there...
{sigh} Spoken like a true PC server user.
I've got four S70s which are almost identical to the S80 but max at 12 processors instead of the S80's 24.
When you think server, you see a tower or maybe even a rack-mount PC. The S80 is no such beast. It is literally the size of an industrial refridgerator. And that's just for the processors. Right next to it is another cabinet of a similar size which has the IO drawers, drives and else.
The only parts of the S80 that are not redundant are the processors and memory. Since both are non-moving, non-mechanical parts, they have an ultra long MTBF. If either fries, the machine takes itself down, 'deconfigures' the failed item and then brings itself back online. Try to get any PC server out there to do that.
(Our S70 lost one of 12 processors three weeks ago at threeish in the morning. It was down and up so quickly no one even noticed it. A few days later, I was reviewing some logs and noticed that I was short a processor.)
Yes, no system is failure-proof. However, the mindset that the S80 suffers from the same problems as a PC server is as silly as thinking a Piper Cub is in the same league as Air Force One (the president's plane).
Internally, the S80 is redundant and can support an amazing load, externally, the DNS system will out-live us all.
InitZero
You are correct. .com is not separable from .com.. it's all one zone. just as the trailing dot is a zone.
the . in
(April 20, 2000) Up to recently, Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) used a Sun E10000, one of the powerhouses of the computer world. But recently, they've moved to a brand new IBM RS/6000 S80. What brought on this startling change? The Dali Lama caught up with someone from NSI recently and here's what went on.
"Well, it all started with Comdex last year." says J.R. Bob Dobbs, VP of Sales at NSI. "Sally over in Marketing talked to this really cool guy at the IBM exihibit. Anyway, he said he could get this really great deal on this new equipment they had coming out. and she said to me 'Wow, think of the free publicity...' and we just knew we had to move. Besides, the old E10000 allows you to do maintance while part of it isn't working, and I'd rather it just stop working while someone is fixing it! I mean, when you blow a tire on your car, do you want it to actually keep driving instead of forcing you to pull over! Come on, that's dumb!"
But what of the costs of migrating to an entirely new Unix platform? and the support costs? Dobbs commented "Well, the migration wasn't very easy, but after calling IBM technical support every day for the past month, hiring IBM global services to come out and fix it repeatedly, and firing our entire Solaris loving admin staff, we're through the migration already! I don't care if the new Sun processors and new 128 processor machine is coming out in six months, I want to spam the domain owners now! Besides, IBM assured us that he would install this great tool called 'smit' on the machine. Hell, I'm the Systems Engineer now! I don't even know what it's doing, I just point and click and it does stuff! Think about the huge amounts of savings with Administrative staff! Besides, IBM assures me I won't need anything but smit! I'm even IBM certified!"
And what of the older processes still in place, like mail forms for registration names, and sending 'CRYPT-PW' via mail? Bob quickly snarled back with "Oh, you want security? wah, go cry in your milk, you linux pussy. I got the root server, fuck off."
Obviously, great things are instore for NSI in the future.
[note: Sorry if I'm a little biased, but how probable is this scenerio? Anyone else ever dealt NSI or IBM on a 'professional' level? And yes, it's all a joke. J.R. Bob Dobbs is entirely too cool to talk to the Dali Lama.]
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
You see, outside of the WinNT server world, you have mainframes capable of huge amounts of processing by themselves... when you have 24 processors in one box, who needs load-balancing?
(and DNS has so many hot backups worldwide, redundancy is, well, taken care of
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
ANd all of what, six, that they sold last year?
Then again, I still have a stash of the pre-cube
single little blue bulbs, a handful of flashcubes (not magicubes; they needed a battery),
and even some #5 bulbs (or are mine 25s? I forget)--the ones nearly the size of a golfball.
And I have the cameras to go with them. What I *don't* have is the 120 and 620 film (but you can still get at least the 120) that the cameras take . . . ooh, and one that takes 127 . . .
There are still tons left.
/. sucks.
slashslashdot.* is still available. Somebody could turn that into a good "News for Serial Killers. Stuff That Splatters" web site.
antislashdot.* is available too. The site for people who think
Or you could just take suckdot.org. I'm surprised nobody took this one after the suck.com parody.
But dot[dot[dot[...]]].* are all taken up to 5 dots. So's quux.net. You can't have that one.
If anyone uses one of these and IPOs and makes a fortune, can you buy me a sports car? Thanks!
/peter
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
And let us not forget microsoft, who put the . in .borg . . .
.]
:()
[I hope this doesn't appear twice; it looked like the message that flashed as I was killing the box said somehtin like slashdot requrires 70 seconds between comments . .
--
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
No load balancing/[obligatory beowulf]/Round Robin?
I would like to think there is some redundancy in there...
Furthermore, arpa wasn't the only game in town. Federal funding certainly let it grow into what is now the internet, but the seeds had also been planted elswehere. Had it not been for federal funding, fidonet (or possibly something else) could have grown into what we now know as the internet.
It was going to happen; the question is merely when and from what roots.
Hmm, and I'd bet spam would be significantly less of an issue had it grown from fidonet, but that's a completely different issue . . .
Our Root server (not NSI, one of the others) is a dual-processor Sun 450 with 4 Gigs of RAM.
Bind 9 does load balancing between two or more processors, bind 8... well... doesn't. Running top on the root server while it's running, and you see CPU3 with high utilization, and cpu 1 with like 1% (only from top and the shell)
I don't really see the point of going multiple processors until they use Bind 9.
FWIW, the 'A' server really isn't the master of the root domain anymore, since ICANN has control over what goes in, and what stays out of the root zone.
As for the single point of failure, if A blows up, destroyed by fire, destroyed by quake, etc., the others just simply will have to pick up the load of the missing 'A'.
If the mechanism of downloading the zones fails, we have a while (a few weeks) to make up our minds about what to do before bad things happen -- like internet not working anymore.
And I know at least one Root Server Operator (well, me...) who checks out slashdot daily. I bet more do.
-- If you met me, you probably wouldn't remember me. I'm pretty hard to remember.
Actually.. they are not the . in .com, the article misrepresents the truth.
.com is not separable from the domain.. as every domain begins with a dot and ends in ... whatever..
The . is actually the trailing dot, ie '.com.'. The top-level zone in DNS, that all other records are part of is simply '.'. It's assumed, and not normally written with a domain name (anyone working with bind sees this constantly)
The dot in
A well loaded E10K is several million. $80K is probably the cost of the empty chassis if you qualify for some kind of special deal from Sun.
It was shipping long before that as the Cray CS6400. This is technology bought from Cray Research, Inc. in 1997. They were being acquired by SGI and wanted to unload technology that competed directly with SGI's Origin2000.
1. a.root was a Sun E450 with quad 300mhz sun4u processors and 4gb of ram until ~1 month ago 2. the rootservers have never answered "millions" of queries per second. more like 6000 queries per second. 3. the IBM incarnation of a.root also has quad (323mhz?) processors, not 24 as the article states. all in all, a lot of blather with little technical or reality basis.
I wonder if there were any technical reasons for the switch of platfrom... ie Solaris to AIX... or if it a corpoarte agreement... specially since netSOl was bought by versign.
I've always been annoyed at Sun saying this. It was I who suggested that dot be the character to divide the multilevel domains in an arpanet 2-level domain, and Jon Postel who later drafted it. We gotta stop Sun from saying this. And no, I'm not making this up. The record is at this page with archives from the tcp-ip digest of Jannuary, 1982.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
F.root-servers.net claims to be the busiest with 260 million queries/day running on twin ES40 COMPAQ alpha servers.
Sounds like a whole lotta 'dot' to me.
----------------------------------------------
I don't really mind double posts on
This looks like AIX system configuration output.
How did you get this?
BTW, the proc[0-3] represents the processor card, each of which holds 6 processors and is hooked to the backplane (thus the 00-)
But there are just more more credible quotes to make fun of rather than the same one OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. you know, ones where they said what they meant and it still came out wrong...
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Scary, huh?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"