DNS Root Servers Outside US Surpass Those Inside

penciling_in writes "Paul Rendek, head of member services and communica of RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) has reported on CircleID that: 'For the first time in Internet history the number of instances of DNS root servers outside the United States has overtaken the number within. The balance was tipped by the recent launch in Frankfurt of an anycast instance of the RIPE NCC operated K-root server.' In the same report, Daniel Karrenberg, Chief Scientist of the RIPE NCC says: 'We monitor the quality of the root name service from more than 50 locations worldwide, and we publish the results for everyone to see.'"

Comments

Re:Can someone please explain

[changelingyahoo.com]

If all the root servers somehow miraculously disappeared then most people would be alright for 1-2 days. After 2 days all the cached NS records for .com will have expired and virtually no one will be able to resolve any .com addresses. Similar results for all other TLDs, but the time until resolution failure for each TLD can differ.
Of course this is a highly unlikely scenerio as there are 13 root DNS servers and many of these servers are actually multiple machines using anycast (for example). Of course, taking out a handful of the machines places sufficient load on the remaining servers to cause them to start dropping requests, but this too is unlikely.

Germans?

[KalvinB]

I think you're confused. The Germans volunteered to change the names of things such as saurekraut (I'm only half German) to "Liberty Cabbage" during WWII because they were getting persecuted so much by (you guessed it) Americans. We Americans know that the French are too stuck up to stick it to themselves so we changed "their" things to names like "Freedom Toast." And I'm not old. I learned that "Liberty Cabbage" thing from Grandpa Simpson. I kid you not. Simpson's is edumacational.

And besides, even the govenment couldn't change the name to "Freedom Hosts" because even they are slaves to VeriSign. It'd be all wrapped up in too much irony. Even for this administration.

Source

Ben

Re:Can someone please explain

[morelife]

Those numbers don't change, ...
They can, and often do.

How often do calls to the "root server" get made

Many millions of times an hour. Each zone (or domain, in practical terms) has expiration and refresh times. In addition to caching host and other data, these expiration (ttl) and refresh times get cached as well. The clock is ticking on the ttl when first cached, and when it expires a new lookup will have to be made (even if the resulting information is, as you said, identical, e.g. it "doesn't change") Just about every time a lookup is made by a tier 3 name server the query will recursively end up at a root server which will point it back down to a gTLD server and down to the tld auth server which finally sends the data to the requestor.

Or something like that :) The root servers have to operate in a highly reliable way, as almost all name servers use them.. There is hardly a service on the 'net that does NOT rely on names (mail, nntp, shoutcast streaming, rss, http, etc), but you are right in that strictly speaking, routing operations are IP address based and have little to do with DNS.

It's nice to see an article by someone who knows

[qtp]

what they are talking about for a change.

The recent flurry of articles giving the impression that VeriSign is somehow "in charge" of DNS has been rather irritating, when in fact, it is not difficult to configure your DNS server to ignore VeriSign operated root servers. (If you're using bind, dont include thier roots in your roots.cache zone file. I'm sure there's an equivalent trick for djbdns.)

I wish all of those who are about to continue the current flood of "what difference does it make?" and "VeriSign controls DNS anyway." posts would kindly read this article and this one as well for a breif tutorial on DNS from that programmer who writes good shit but everyone says they hate him anyway, D. J. Bernstein.

If you like the subject, maybe you should go out and buy a copy of DNS and BIND so you'll have something interesting to talk about at the coffee house this weekend.

The truth is that DNS is a distributed system that is rather well designed to be redundant. The anycast implementation mentioned in the article is a good and needed way (it's the right way[tm]) to increase the redundancy that is already inherent in the system, making DNS much more secure and resistant to DDOS attacks and other attempts to disrupt DNS service. VeriSign showing off thier "secure" sites, and blowing thier own horn about how "important" they in particular are to the internet is a load of sh*t that should not be given a second thought unless you are in the habit of educating our lawmakers about related issues. Not an especially good habit, it will make you enemies (but only if you're right).