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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse (was Re: Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?)
On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 10:20:13PM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote: > On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, Mark Andrews wrote: > >> Do I need to modify our cache server configuration to > >> enable it? > > > > Only if you wish to do all your other customers a disfavour > > by configuring your caching servers to support a private > > namespace then yes. > > There's no particular technical magic to the ICANN-run roots, except that > it's what just about everybody else is using. This means that if you > enter the same hostname on two computers far away from each other, you're > probably going to end up at the same place, or at least at places run by > the same organization. This standardization is valuable, so anybody > trying to make a different standard that isn't widely used compete with it > is going to have a hard time convincing people to switch. > > That doesn't mean a competing system wouldn't work, for those who are > using it. They'd just be limited in who they could talk to, and that > generally wouldn't be very appealing. Well, Steve; that reply is a *little* disingenuous: all of the alternative root zones and root server clusters that *I'm* aware of track the ICANN root, except in the rare instances where there are TLD collisions. I'm not aware of any such specific collisions; I stopped tracking that area when NetSol shutdown that mailing list without warning several years ago. I merely observe that they're possible. > A system that would limit my ability to talk to people in other countries > doesn't sound very appealing to me. On the other hand, the Chinese > government has been trying hard to limit or control communications between > people in China and the rest of the world for years. In that sense, > maintaining their own DNS root, incompatible with the rest of the world, > might be seen as a considerable advantage. If they don't care about > breaking compatibility with the DNS root the rest of the world uses, the > disadvantages of such a scheme become fairly moot. Eric Raymond, that polarizing ambassador for open source, likes to disseminate the word (and concept) "conflating" -- that being the habit, or attempt, by an arguer of a point to hook together two related but distinct concepts that may both be involved in a topic, but may not have the cause and effect relationship being implied by said arguer. This is a good example, IMHO: Even if China *did* maintain their own root, unless they also maintained their own copies of the 2LD's, like .com, they couldn't snip out *specific* sites they didn't want people to see. But the whole "there's a non-ICANN root: the sky is falling" thing is an argument cooked up to scare the unwashed; us old wallas don't buy it. I just hope none of the unwashed *press* decide to blow the lid off of it; the public's lack of understanding of the underpinnings of the net is painful enough now... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [email protected] Designer +-Internetworking------+----------+ RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates | Best Practices Wiki | | '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://bestpractices.wikicities.com +1 727 647 1274 If you can read this... thank a system administrator. Or two. --me
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