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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 Their E10000 which was serving as the A.Root server has been replaced by an IBM RS/6000 S80.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!"
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.
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?
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)
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'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.
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.
Last time i checked, RFC 882 put the dot in .com
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.
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.
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 ..
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
*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
(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
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
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
Reasons Al Gore should be replaced with an RS/6000:
It is much more expressive.
It doesn't require $500 haircuts.
It doesn't come with Tipper Gore chained to it.
It doesn't say nearly as much dumb stuff.
Give it a 'net connection and it can attend global events virtually! Saves on $70,000 joy rides in Air Force Two.
There is very little chance the RS/6000 could be swayed by Microsoft into calling the DOJ off. Now if IBM were to offer a couple new CPU's, we'd be in trouble.
It doesn't waffle. Everything is yes or no, 1 or 0. No more bullshit answers.
.sig: Now legally binding!
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.
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.
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I don't really mind double posts on
Scary, huh?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
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