On Wednesday, May 7, 2003, at 20:29 Canada/Eastern,
rolandom@info.com.ph wrote:
Hi, this is roland marasigan of infocom (philippines). What benefit/s
we are going to get once we have this server ?
There are three principal benefits for an ISP in having access to a
local root nameserver:
1. self-sufficiency -- resolvers will continue to function in a
predictable way even during a loss of international connectivity, since
they have a local root nameserver they can talk to,
2. performance -- resolvers will have a much lower latency (and, often,
a less congested) path to a local root nameserver than to a root
nameserver reachable across an ocean. This improves the average speed
of DNS resolution, since recursive queries aimed at the root will get
answered more quickly, and
3. resilience -- if a denial-of-service attack is launched at the F
root nameserver in some other part of the world, the traffic will land
at a different instance of F and hence the local community will not see
any effects of the attack. Conversely, a locally-originated attack will
hit just the local F root node, and leave the rest of the world's F
root nameservice unaffected. This makes the root nameserver complex as
a whole more resilient.
There is an additional indirect benefit for the operator in that having
a distributed set of sinks for attack traffic makes it easier for the
root server operator to identify the source of an attack. The quicker
the source of an attack can be identified, the sooner the attack can be
stopped.
I wrote up a description of the general approach we're taking with
this, if you're interested in the routing details:
Each local F root nameserver node we deploy serves a particular region
of the Internet, and not the whole world (that's the "hierarchical" bit
in that document), so you need to be in reasonable network proximity to
one of these new F root nodes before you will gain benefit from it.
Normally that means either peering directly with the F root node over
an exchange point (e.g. the HKIX in Hong Kong), or being a customer of
someone who does (or their customer, etc).
We (Internet Software Consortium) are doing our best to deploy lots of
remote F root nodes around the world, so that the chances of being
within range of a local F root node are good. In the Asia Pacific
region we are working with APNIC to make this happen.
