North American Network Operators Group

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RE: How common is lack of DNS server diversity?

  • From: Roeland Meyer
  • Date: Sat Jan 27 18:27:05 2001

Good feed-back, thanks.

> From: Sean Donelan [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2001 2:34 PM

> On Sat, 27 January 2001, Roeland Meyer wrote:
> > <Root server> ::= Any DNS server that has final authority 
> for a <domain
> > tier/level>;
> 
> Wouldn't a better term be "authoritative server"?  It states 
> what it is,
> and doesn't have the semantic overload of your use of "root server."

I agree, but the definitions were evolved from existing, not recreated. The
problem is that there are tiers of responsibility with in the LD and there
are many LDs. For example; UK has both the TLD and SLD as fixed and sells
registrations in the 3LD. AU also does this, but are considering opening up
the SLD for new registrations. We have two different authority layers here,
not just one. Also ml.org --> dhs.com, sells 3LDs in COM, how do we talk
about them, operationally?

Also authority, for any LD, is different than that for a zone. Yet, both
name servers will answer as authoritative. Even the software doesn't make a
distinction. Further, and here is where the semantics become difficult, what
do you call the final non-recursive authority vs. the authoritative
recursive resolving authority (and do you want to spell that definition out
10 times per paragraph)?

> Unless, of course, you are in marketing in which case you 
> want semantic
> overload such as Microsoft's use of "Digital Nervous System" (DNS) to
> create confusion.

<g> ref Halloween I & II <g> But, that is yet another reason to further
refine the semantics... before MSFT does! IMHO, engineers who sneer at Mktg,
have no idea how much of their lives are ruled by it.

> Root Server == An authoritative server for the "." (root) of 
> the domain
>                name system

The problem is that we have more than one set of authoritative root servers
and one set includes the other. The current semantics do not allow that at
all. This is fine for the unified-root school, but the reality is that it
isn't the ONLY school and denial wont make the others go away.

> TLD Server == An authoritative server for a Top Level Domain, such as
>               the generic TLDs (COM, EDU, INT) and country 
>               code TLDs (CA, AU, ZA)

The problem is (as stated above), there are many authority layers beyond
that of the TLD. Yes, some of them are getting politisized (repeat what I
said about Mktg and double it).

The real danger is that a schism is developing in the semantics (between
Eng, Mtkg, and the politicians). This may be a pre-cursor to a schism at the
root-level itself. I would dearly like NOT to see that.