On 15 November 1999, "Richard J. Sexton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>As a footnote, to answer Richard's "Huh?" question, I meant that,
>>instead of having the current roots delegating .com, .net., and .org,
>>what technical issues exist that prevent three mutually exclusive,
>>meta-roots (or whatever you want to call them) each delegating
>>.com, .net, and .org?
>
>I still don't understand the question. The root servers point to
>the TLD servers. So, the legacy root serevrs - and the ORSC
>root servers - point to NSI's COM/NET/ORG servers.
>
>What exactly did you want to change?
Sorry, today's not my day for being clear. But I'll give it a shot.
If I'm still not being clear, maybe someone who gets what I'm at will
chime in. This head cold's killing me.
Anyway, yea, right now we've got the legacy roots pointing to NSI's
TLD servers. What I'm proposing (and what I assume most people mean
when they speak of 'multiple competing roots') is something along the lines
of this:
Instead of all of the roots delegating com/net/org to NSI, let's say
one delegates com. One delegates net. One delegates org. None of
the roots know about or pass on information about the others. This
setup would allow for other such situations, where a competing root
that delegated foo could be introduced.
Now, before people go ballistic, here's what I mean when I propose
seperate, competing roots:
1) They MUST be limited in number, and still under central control.
I don't want to see any yahoo who thinks they can set up DNS
becoming a root, and I'm fairly sure this is what most people fear
when they discuss this sort of thing. Entry could be barred by
pre-requisite infrastructure, investment, fees, contractual
obligations, what-have-you.
2) They MUST be mutually exclusive. I'm not saying that we should have
multiple roots delegating the same domains in a non-shared manner.
This must be enforced by strict and harsh penalties for infringing
upon other delegations, etc.
But when I say under central control, I mean something akin to what we
have now, but loosened up a bit. Allow the possibility of seperate
regulated roots delegating mutually-exclusive TLDs. At some point in
the future, the legacy roots are going to become a bottleneck, particularly
if TLD-space is expanded.
Really, the issue is: Is a centralized root system scalable into the
forseeable future, or would it be wise to start considering an alternative
in which, perhaps, resolver is tweaked a bit to discover roots, instead
of having them fed to it via named or whatever DNS you choose?
Here's a thought: Maybe a strictly controlled TLD, akin to the
in-addr.arpa delegation scheme, for roots. An AXFR from this domain
would yield the list of valid roots. In this way, you could potentially
have a managed set of multiple competing roots.
If I'm rehashing old arguments, please let me know, but point out a
reference to them so I can go over them.
--
Mark C. Langston
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems Admin
San Jose, CA
