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The Root of All E-Mail
wiredog writes "A Washington Post story about the DNS, the VeriSign NOC, and some of the security therein." Especially interesting in light of the recent security lockdowns throughout much of the Western world. The havoc of losing the A root server would be bad, like Staypuft Marshmallow Man bad.
The article seemed to be a little scare-mongery, considering how they go on to describe that the other root servers can easily take over.
A bigger question is: how well protected are the public peering points, like MAE East and MAE West? Since even international traffic is often routed through them, we would see an instant slowdown if one of those two nerve centers were destroyed. Big businesses might have private peering arrangements that would survive, but you can bet that a ton of smaller sites would be affected by a loss of a MAE.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Ummm... on the highway in front of the NSA HQ the exit sign says NSA. After you make the exit, there is a big giant NSA sign with the seal and everything. Just past the Shell station.
Also, before every enterence to the CIA there is a sign that says "CIA Next Left" or "CIA Next Right (just pas the Shell station)." Dolly Madison Parkway I think, or is that Chain bridge Rd? Forgot since I don't drive by there any more.
NRO enterance is on a small road off Rt. 28 in Chantilly, VA (I can see it from my office cube). There are not any signs on 28 announcing it, but on the entrence side there is a big giant NRO sign and another NRO sign that marks the Contractor's entrence.
The Mapping and Imaging HQ has a big giant sign in front of it, on Sunrise Valley Rd. in Reston, VA, corner at Fairfax County Parkway with Dulles Tollroad on the other side. No signs on the tollroad for it though. Sprint runs AOL's backbone from right down Sunrise Valley with no sign (other than the address) out front. Right next to the INRI building. No Shell station nearby.
At "Station C" in Remington, VA (see "numbers stations") there is a big historical marker inside the fence, right by zads of antennas. Just a couple of miles past the Shell station.
Yes, all of the Shell station refrences are real and an odd "coincidence", since there is not a Shell station right by the NRO, nor is there one right by the Herndon NOC for VeriSign.
Hummm... watch out for the Shell stations of you want to find something kinda secret I gues
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Just FYI:
:-)
The root-servers know where to find everything which is below the root (like com, edu, net, nl, au, cn, tw, us).
The gtld-servers (global top level domain, i.e. the non-country codes) know where to find everything which is like philips.com, freebsd.org and berkely.edu.
The country-code-servers know where to find xs4all.nl, org.au and co.uk.
In the past I've made a small tool called dnstracer (shameless plug) which shows you what queries your DNS server is doing to get the answer for a hostname.
If you play a little bit around with it you'll see how easy it is to live without connectivity to the root-servers.net machines, thanks to caching etc. Well, for the first two days that is
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