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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.'"
If you are in an insulated internet enviroment, such as china or certain american networks, is it possible to hook up to one of these external DNS servers and use it to handle your NS requests, or would you need to have an existing account with a foriegn ISP?
I'm an American, and I love the US, but the imbalance of the internet towards the US has always bothered me. To me, it always has seemed that it should be a completely global venture, and be supported fairly evenly throughout the globe.
DNS servers are probably a good indicator of internet usage/participation and the fact that other countries are catching up is a good thing; however, just shy of half of the DNS servers are still in the US. That's pretty sad considering we represent less than 5% of the global population. Here's to hoping other countries continue to grow in their participation.
Also, I hope Babelfish improves as globalizations continues.....
The terrorists have won, notice the amount of security at every stadium/airport/large public gathering in the US. Americans are scared of their own freakin shadows.
The routers themselves deal in numerical IP space, right? Why is name service so dang important?
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
It kind of reminds me of how the Annual Hockey game is always North America vs. the World (even though the world has some good hockey players).
That's wonderful also and I think that the Internet and everything should also be more globalized, but the DNS servers are providing a resource that has a certain demand associated. Simply, the internet should be skewed to America because, for whatever reason (they are obvious), America likely generates the most requests and receives the most requests (though I don't know the numbers, maybe China is coming close?). Obviously, if nearly all of the surfing consists of Americans accessing American sites, then an extra server in Germany serves little utility (aside from alleviating, perhaps, accesses outside of the country).
So (obviously) establishing more servers in other countries won't globalize the internet any more, it's an indication (and a positive one) of some increasing global demand.
That is, unless Germany just wasting a bunch of money simply so that the world may pass the U.S. in Root servers.
In the bad old days you and you alone were in control of name resolution. For those of you without receding and/or grey hairlines who may not know or remember this, you had a file called hosts.txt that contained all the mappings of names to IPs. That, obviously, didn't scale and DNS was developed and was widely deployed by about 86 or so.
The one big gotcha with DNS is it takes control out of your hands. That is, you may have your own DNS server locally, but you traditionally refer to other servers that serve up the root zone that tells your DNS server where all the TLD servers are. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to use other machines, not your own, for this.
This is wrong for many reasons:
But there are ways around this. The easiest if is you static route the 13 root server IPs to your own nameserver. Then you can run an unmodified copt of the legacy root zone on your own nameserver and the US government root servers can be backhoed or DDOS'd and you wouldn't even notice. ISP's are starting to figure this out, especiallly ones with expensive longhaul connections.
Or, you can modify your nameserver to declare youtself primary for the root zone (which you've dutifully downloaded) and edit out the declarations for "." in the legacy root zone.
Or you can use the ORSC root zone. If it's good enough for two ICANN board members, it's good enough for you.
Whatever you do, for God's sake dump bind and use DJBDNS. It really is so much better it's just not funny.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Sorry to inform you that there are ignorant people in every country. People that are only concerned with the immediate fascinity. I believe is was Dan Quayle that said they speak Latin in Latin America and well, he's a moron just like Bush Jr. I'm ashamed such a person came to power, I was 4 months shy of being able to vote for that election and I will definitely be working to ensure he doesn't stay in office. At any rate there are stereotypes people keep about others, some people reject them and some people don't. Back to the real topic of DNS servers, I'm glad to see that the rest of the world is integrating themselves into the Internet. The system is inherently stronger with more people connected to it. Plus, imagine a couple hundred million more people using Bittorrent! mmmmmmmm, the more the merrier!
"Corporations don't vote our leaders, people do."
Wake up, Neo.
You agree with me leaders are more than some president, yes? This (so-called -- for a chosen leader in a non-transparant nation isn't fair imo) chosen leader decides for the people in a lot of ways. The fact this is called "democratic" doesn't mean it is actually democratic in theory; imo, it isn't.
Even this can be brought futher. Exactly which people assign the leader(s) of a company? Government organisation? NGO? Who decides over ICANN? VeriSign? We all do? Yeah right.
Worse, we as non-US civilian can't vote for some US president, yet this president has tremendous infuence over the lives of people all over the world.
Democracy? In my ass.
Heck, i won't even _start_ about Carlyle...
Before you start with some anti-American conpsiracy the sae is true for the country i'm living in.
In the case such a country has a lot of known influence over the world it'll receive more (valid) criticism, especially on moral issues.
I'm torn between the cushy redundancy offered by decentralization, and the cushy security of having most of the servers in a stable, well-protected country.
Fuirst of all, Germany is what most knowlegable people would call a "stable, well protected country".
Second, that in and of itself does not affect the security or reliability of DNS as it is designed very much, and has even less signifigance now that anycast is proven to be a reliable technique for increasing redundancy.
D. J. Bernstein has provided some good introductory about the workings of DNS, including security.
There's a chapter on DNS security from "DNS and BIND" available at the O'reilly website as well.
The biggest dispute about DNS security (and internet security in general) is between those who prefer centralized, single point solutions, and those who prefer distributed, autonomous security measures. IMHO, centralized security creates weakness in most (all?) cases by creating a single point of failure, and is an approach that is most often motivated by the desire to exert control over internet usage in hopes of personal gain (re: VeriSign), and to establish an authority because of a misguided belief that there need be one.
The internet's basic strength is due to it's lack of dependance on centralized authorities in order to work. Any proposals that change that basic assumption are either poorly thought out or suspect.
Read, L