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The Root of All E-Mail

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the must-keep-safe dept.

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.

2 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. No, wrong, stupid by Leperflesh · · Score: 1, Redundant

    "The havoc of losing the A root server would be bad, like Staypuft Marshmallow Man bad. "

    No, read the goddamn article already;

    "The DNS is built so that eight or more of the world's 13 master root servers would have to fail before ordinary Internet users started to see slowdowns, according to John Crain, manager of technical operations for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)."

    Duh.

    -Leperflesh

    --
    I am allowed to criticize you: you are not allowed to criticize me. Sorry, that's just how things are.
  2. Distributed DNS? by PM4RK5 · · Score: 1, Redundant

    If losing a root server is so bad, then maybe all of us with *nix and *BSD boxes should start running caching DNS servers? It'd essentially be a distributed DNS, but then you'd lose all central control of DNS names. If they fear losing one of their root servers, maybe they should offer a distributed solution that would make it hard to take out 'the server,' if you will.
    As we've seen with other distributed networks, like gnutella and Kazaa (please excuse the crude analogy), it's nearly impossible to take the entire network down in one fell swoop, as it is with a centralized server (like Napster had/has).

    Just my two cents.