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ICANN, National Registrars Still Feuding
Damalloch writes: "The BBC website has this story about the EU's concern over ICANN's refusal to make guarantees about root server stability. Domain name registrars such as Nominet are threatening to withhold payment of ICAAN's fees unless something is done to reassure them. So far ICAAN has remained stubborn because of the huge lawsuit potential if a root server were to go down but with the possibility of having their income reduced, they might just be convinced to do something."
..no link to the root server? how can we /. it?
this was a joke.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But if one server went down wouldn't the requests just go to the other root servers instead? Isn't that how DNS works?
So presumably they've got decent machines and power supplies and connections for each server. And so the chance of one going down is quite low. The chance of enough of them going down at the same time to cause disaster has to be vanishingly small. If it's too big, add a few more servers.
Unless they include the possibility of them being hacked I suppose. But then they could just use several different operating systems and name server software to hugely reduce the chances.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that this is really the reason they won't give any guarantees, it seems like a reasonably safe thing to do to me.
Sig is taking a break!
They'd need ISPs who run DNS servers for their clients to point to their root servers. This is somewhat nontrivial.
Firstly and foremost because it's a U.S. entity who pretends to be an international entity and the Internet quit being a U.S. entity a long time ago.
I suspect that China will be the first to set up its own root DNS servers and start issuing non-ICANN-approved domain names, probably in competition with ICANN and Versign. Other's will soon follow. Soon every big ISP both in the U.S. will see the need to have its own root DNS server. Of course there will be some cooperation required between the different DNS roots if their customers are going to be happy. Hopefully, this new cooperation will end the monopoly ICANN has over the administration of the Internet, leaving unsportsman like players like Versign standing out in left field, wondering why nobody is tossing them the ball anymore.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Almost every time anyone looks for a webpage these root servers are consulted.
Surely this cannot be true... Don't DNS servers cache address resolutions?
I Heart Sorting Networks
If ICANN can't legally hold accountable the people running the root servers, then there's no way they'd provide any guarantees to anyone. That much makes sense.
Furthermore, the root servers (again, from the article, don't flame me if I'm missing a nuance or two) don't really DO much. They just tell you where to go to get info for each of the top-level domains. Not exactly a whole lot to running one of these other than keeping it from crashing.
My question, though, is why is anyone worried about a root server crashing? There are 13 of 'em. Wouldn't your DNS server ask someone else if the "preferred" root server suddenly went Tango Uniform? Are there backup root servers out there to jump in? Ways to route around the damage, as it were?
What I still find amazing is that ICANN hasn't managed to take full physical and financial control of all the root servers. When I was in school, I remember thinking it was cool that we had one of the root servers (terp) in my building. It was amazing to see how a loose group of unrelated institutions had somehow set up a reliable, workable, DNS system.
In fact, it sounds like this is still the case, somewhat. Do these root server operators have ANY contractual controls on what they do? If not, then why the hell can't we just get THEM to add new top level domains? Screw ICANN. The servers don't belong to them, they belong to the people running 'em. As long as the guys running the roots don't point
And, if they were to do this, could ICANN even stop them? They'd have to repoint all the root.hints files across the entire globe, wouldn't they?
Or is this the kind of Chaos that the EU is afraid of?
A faulty version of software was released. And yes the fault was buried waaay down in a giant case or if/elseif statement. Normally no big deal, right? Just roll back. But they had things set up so that any machine connected to another would poll it for the version of software it had. If what it connected to had a newer version, it would download that and then hand it off to all its fellows. So by the time the bad code triggered and they realized they had a problem it had already spread virus-like across the whole network. Going back to the older version one one machine was futile because as soon as it booted up it would connect to other machines and download the flawed software.
They had to eventually take their old version, give it a new, higher number, and then compile and release that. So that that 'feature' once again became a feature and not a bug. Many lessons to be learned.
This is true, to an extent. Different and widely spread organizations run the root name servers, using different OS's, hardware configurations, and network connectivity.
Concentrating and centralizing the root name servers would defeat the diversity that now exists. If one goes down, the others pick up the load. If there's a fatal hardware bug in one, it probably won't affect the servers running on different hardware. And, most of all, A single business or management failure will not disrupt root nameservice.Whoever in the EU (I suspect it's some ex-communist beaurocrat who loves centralized authority) thinks that things are bad now should read the RFC 2870, Root Name Server Operational Requirements and get a clue.
Huh?
What did I miss? We all have to meet requirements, whether your a 5 nines shop (god help you) or not with respect to uptime and service availability. Why should ICANN be any different?
Cheers,
-- RLJ
The root servers are what makes a sea of unconnected networks into the apparently seamless internet. What you are suggesting would fragment the internet back into separate networks. Typing slashdot.org in europe could go to their 'root' servers and be directed to whoever their root says owns that domain. While typing the same address elsewhere in the world would take you to a different site.
Pretty big change. There have been companies that set up new top level extensions (impatient with ICANN and who can blame them) and sell those addresses, but for visitors to get to those sites the visitors need to have the dns settings in their computer modified. And if ICANN eventually rolls out the new extension (and I think there is one extension that this applies to, can anyone remember? biz maybe?) you could then have two company.biz sites, and which one the browser goes to depends on which root it's querying. Man, what a mess.
Given the nature of how DNS works, and how the root servers are run, how can ICANN guarantee anything? (it can't) If they do provide some sort of guarantee then haven't they added a financial incentive for someone to DOS the root servers?
The Europeans are asking for something that cannot be delivered (currently), and if they get it the chances increase that someone will DOS the servers for some financial gain. (i.e. your server went down, I now don't have to pay you x dollars). If I was ICANN I wouldn't want to sign an agreement. It may be time for ICANN to change the way it does business, and the "ad hoc" nature that the root servers are maintained may have to change. DNS the protocol itself needs to be very carefully looked at as well.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
At the few places I've worked, the policy's always been that TTL = expected worst-case response time from the networking group plus a fudge factor.
So, if DNS goes down at 10:00pm on a Friday, people (who have the addresses cached) can still get to the machines until the hung-over networking crew logs in to check things out the next morning.
They'd bump the TTL way down, on the other hand, when major machine moves were planned.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
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If I read this correctly, the reason why the EU local registries don't have their own root servers, and hence control over service levels is a historical issue.
Excerpting from the Internet Software Consortium's page, linked above - and please allow me to state that such a reference is anecdotal rather than given fact,
The "one in Europe" btw was NOT Nominet or another registrar, it was a guy working for LINX, the London INternet eXchange.
There's good reason for this, as late as the early 1990s, Europe was still thinking that X.500 was the way forward, and a large amount of resources from universities, telcos and local standards agencies was devoted to "interoperability" testing of X.500 directory services. What really happened was the standards lagged the implementations so badly that vendors and implementors went ahead and did their own thing, creating, as anyone who has dealt with X.500, a nightmare for inter -vendor interoperability. That created the space in which the InterNet and DNS / BIND could flourish. FWIW, LDAP is a (nor precisely, so please don't flame me, too large a subject for absolute accuracy here) derivative of X.400, itself a cut down form of X.500. Novell's eDirectory, which runs some of the largest sites (CNN.com, AOL messenger services) is itself a souped up LDAP implementation.
You can find a brief overview of X.500 and what the "authorities" in Europe were up to as late as 1990 and beyond in this history of X.500
I'm British born myself, but this all seems to me to be Euro - Whining. Particularly the UK's Nominet making an issue of this is absolutely BS. Nominet has, IMO, very sharp practises. If you "buy" a domain in the UK (domain.co.uk) via an ISP, Nominet maintains a "tag" linking your domain to the "provding" ISP, until another ISP takes it over. Domains _never_ go back into circulation when they expire. Nominet refuses, on the whole, unless you threaten or cajoule them with considerable effort, to "release" your domain because it states it will not get involved in contractual disputes between you and your ISP. Most UK ISPs make contracts which lock you in to your services and charge a considerable and hefty severance fee, usually buried in the small print. You _can_ get a "Neutral Tag" applied to a UK domain, if you pay GBP £80 for two years, which fee goes back to the ISPs who are members of Nominet, which is a for profit company, limited by guarantee, a rare form of UK company which offers very lax statutory reporting. Even though you _can_ do all this, I've had several clients now who've complained to Nominet, e.g. when their ISP is TU and no longer provides service, and Nominet tells them anyway that they can only deal with an ISP who is a member of Nominet. Obviously that's BS. But you can't register a domain in the UK for
Sorry for that rant against Nominet, but it's Crocodile Tears time again and minus several million points for the Brits, as per usual.
Please follow the links above, investigate yourself . . .
Reassigning a root server address is hard because the operator likely has other machines in the address block whose numbers would also have to change.
The EU concern is not irrational, it is pretty wierd that the root zone is essentially a volunteer effort given that the costs are not negligible and the responsibility immense.
Against this however there is a major political issue at stake. The root operators are in effect the arbiters of the DNS. If ICANN gets too big for its boots they are a check on it.
The other issue is that there are very few companies that could credibly manage the root zone on a contractual basis. It is one thing to run a server on a volunteer basis, quite another to provide a service guarantee.
One thing that is in the pipe that may well change some of the concerns, in particular anycast addressing which allows multiple servers to sit on the same IP address. The packets are routed to the 'nearest' machine. That will allow the deploment of additional root servers. It will also address some of the denial of service concerns.
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