Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Root Zone Changed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the verisign-causing-instability-as-usual dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The day before yesterday the root zone was silently changed for the first time in 5 years. The change was to J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET that is now managed by Verisign. The usual sites don't breathe a word about this change however as one would expect for such a change to be properly announced. An interesing sidenote is this thread on the IETF discussion list." the_proton writes "The server j.root-servers.net has changed IP address to 192.58.128.30. The new root zone hints can be grabbed from ftp://rs.internic.net/domain/named.root or ftp://ftp.internic.net/domain/named.root. The new zone serial number is 2002110501."

2 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Why should we care? by Disoriented · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe someone could explain to us newbies how this affects the operation of the Internet.

  2. Don't panic - and there is no conspiricy by karl.auerbach · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This move is "a good thing".

    The J server shared a broadcast domain (i.e. it was on the same Ethernet) as the A root server. That's was clearly sub-optimal.

    So this move is good in that it creates a small bit of physical separation and a bit larger amount of net-topological separation between the J and A root servers.

    I hear that the old server will continue in operation for an indefinite period - so there is no need to rush out and update your "hints" file for your DNS resolvers - you can do it at your leasure and you probably won't notice even if you forget to do it.

    (Even if the old server is turned off - as long as a bogus server doesn't replace it, when DNS resolvers that are using the old hints file come up and look for a root zone definition, they will simply bypass the non-responsive absent server and try the other hints.)

    But there is another issue - A change in the "hints" is always a nuisance. And since we are incurring this nuisance, I wonder why we did not use this as an opportunity to redress the imbalance of root server placement - there are few root servers in Europe and Asia, and rather than simply moving the J server from one side of Herndon, Virginia to another, why wasn't it moved to Europe of Asia?