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Root Zone Changed
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."
the internet. Don't every one go J.ROOT-NET.NET now.
Whenever I go near a "root zone" I end up getting pepper sprayed and charged with sexual assault.
Trolling is a art,
....the day before. See the message. Granted not much warning, but it wasn't silent.
that we are going to need Microsoft passport to make changes to DNS now?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The root servers are the master list of domain names for the Internet. The computers still use IP addresses to talk, but us Humans prefer remembering slashdot.org to 66.35.250.150. In meatspace terms, I think this is along the lines of a construction company changing the composition of their concrete for use on the Highway system, you might not notice the change as a user, but it could be a bad decision. .com? :)
All I want to know is if Sun is back to being the . in
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Following the recent DOS attacks against the root servers, it wouldn't surprise me if this move is only a small part of a bigger story. I'm willing to bet that modifications are being made to the networking and security of the root servers that will better prepare the entire root system for future attacks. The move of J. is probably just the tip of the clandestine "ice berg".
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
To sum up: You don't need to change anything. As long as one of the 13 servers in your hints/cache file responds, your name server will download the updated list on startup. You only have to worry if you've put off updating it so long that all 13 servers have changed IP's. Pretty unlikely, since that would be a hints file that's more than 10 years old at least. (You're not running Linux, anyway...)
And no, this isn't verisign-causing-instability-as-usual. They're actually trying to help it. Before this change, both a.root-servers.net and j.root-servers.net were in the same
Anyone that cares and needs to know about it was properly notified. There was a post to NANOG 3 days ago about it:
*****PLEASE NOTE*****
This is an important Informational Message to the internet community:
November 5, 2002, the IP address for J.root-servers.net will
change in the authoritative NS set for "dot". The change will
be reflected in zone serial # 2002110501.
The new set of servers authoritative for "dot" will be:
A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 198.41.0.4
H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 128.63.2.53
C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 192.33.4.12
G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 192.112.36.4
F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 192.5.5.241
B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 128.9.0.107
J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 192.58.128.30
K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 193.0.14.129
L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 198.32.64.12
M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 202.12.27.33
I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 192.36.148.17
E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 192.203.230.10
D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. 5w6d16h IN A 128.8.10.90
This WILL require a change to your root hints file. The new
file will be available via anonymous ftp from
rs.internic.net:/domain/named.root as well as
ftp.internic.net:/doamin/named.root starting 11/5/02 1700UTC (12pm
EST/9am PST).
Both the new and old j.root-servers.net IP space will provide
answers in parallel for the foreseeable future.
_________________________________________
John Crain
Manager of Technical Operations
ICANN/IANA
crain@icann.org
1AF4 F638 4B2D 3EF2 F9BA 99E4 8D85 69A7
This affects administrators of DNS servers, because in the DNS config is a list of the IP addresses where these root servers can be found.
Why should you care? You probably don't. It doesn't affect you directly. That is, unless all the root servers mysteriously die one day. That would make surfing for your pr0n a thing of near impossibility. :)
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?
"Causing instability as usual"?
You only need one root server, there are 12 others. In fact, it safe to just wait until the next time you upgrade BIND or your operating system... running an out of date file won't hurt anything.
There was no reason to announce anything here. This is really a non-event.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
An anonymous reader writes
;)
Ok. I got that. Next.
"The day before yesterday the root zone was silently changed for the first time in 5 years.
That's english at least. Something changed. Hopefully the rest will tell me what.
The change was to J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET that is now managed by Verisign.
Verisign's evil, right?
The usual sites don't breathe a word about this change however as one would expect for such a change to be properly announced.
Conspiracies are bad, right?
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."
[Brain explodes]
(Isn't it amazing when you read something written in your own language and don't understand a word of what's being said?)
Triv
> The new root zone hints can be grabbed from ftp://rs.internic.net/domain/named.root or ftp://ftp.internic.net/domain/named.root.
/var/named/ (or wherever you installed it).
For those running bind, you may want to try this instead:
dig @e.root-servers.net . ns > root.hints
It will generate the root list automatically, ready for you to drop into
This post is leaving out some details that were brought up on the NANOG mailing list.
This is not a change that needs to be done immediately. For one thing, there are 13 (A - M) root servers. As long as your name server can contact one of them, it will download the latest list at start-up, so your root file can be fairly out of date, and still be fine when running.
Also, the announcement says that the server will respond on both IP addresses "for the forseeable future".
This isn't a question of flipping a switch and everyone having to update their servers at once. A big public announcement would probably just have confused most users for no good reason.
> Maybe someone could explain to us newbies how this affects the operation of the Internet.
.org domains.
Ok.
Here's the usual (much simplified) explanation for how DNS (that is, maping hostnames to IP addresses) works:
Let's assume we want to connect to www.slashdot.org. We need to know it's IP address in order to do this.
What we do is:
1) Ask one of the 13 root servers which server handles
2) Ask that server which server handles the slashdot.org domain.
3)Ask that server which server handles the www.slashdot.org zone.
However, this begs the question:
"Where do the root servers get their info. from?"
Well, as of yesterday they're getting it from 192.58.128.30.
To some extent, 192.58.128.30 is now the most important address on the internet since it is the highest authority for the rather important business of looking up addresses.
Not exactly. The question is actually "how do we find the root servers to ask them who handles .org" aka, "how do we find out who handles '.'".
The answer is to keep a list of the 13 root servers' IPs on disk, in a file called (appropriately enough) "root.hints".
J is *one* of the root servers, and it has changed its IP. Therefore at some point people should update their root.hints files to reflect this change.
There's no hurry, because the other 12 haven't moved, and over time the update will tend to happen without any special help as you upgrade your DNS install, etc.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the recent denial of service attacks against the root servers?
Just speculating that maybe the attackers used a worm/trojan that was preset to attack them at the previous IP on certain dates? Similar to some things we have seen in the past...
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET is considered the ultimate authority in DNS. It is also called "dot" and used to be a healthy Sun box. So they really were the "dot" in .com in a sense and that's what made it so funny. That box was replaced with an IBM box and now IBM could say they are the "dot" in .com.
Link here
I think your suspicion has been confirmed by a this recent New Scientist article. It says one of the Versign root servers was actually moved to a new location so that two servers wouldn't be relying on the same infrastructure. It does not mention the IP change, but it seems to make sense.
If your immediate DNS handled a request for slashdot.org two seconds previously, it should still be cached -- no need to bother a root server over that. Any request would have go up several levels before a root server would be bothered with it. (Otherwise they'd be continually /.'ed :^)
The root servers could all disappear without a lot of disruption, but only for a short time until the cache entries started timing out.
My backup plan is to toss the entire name space into my local hosts file. I've already got DoubleClick in there for testing. :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So they say they are the dot in dot com, but they should really say they are the dot in dot com dot, because they are really the dot after com not the dot before com. However this last dot is often forgotten, it really means the name is absolute rather than relative. This is very much like the leading slash in paths to files.
Hmm, now I'm writing on slashdot about leading slashes and trailing dots, what a coincidence.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?