Discuss mailing list

[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

If we were trying to maintain our own copy of the .com zone, size would 
be an issue.  That file is over 9GB, and it would present a significant 
bandwidth problem to many users.  The .bit zone that is being discussed 
is only 1MB... its so small it fits on a floppy disk.  I still don't 
understand why you think it is a problem to transfer this small of file 
to the T1 and T2 servers?

> "Hey men, there is no reason to mantain copy of all the tld zones in
> >each T1 server: We only need to mantain pointers to the authoritative
> >servers for each tld, and recurse them..."
Well yes, there IS a reason to maintain a copy of the TLD zone files on 
every T1 server.  That is exactly the point of the T1 servers -- to be 
authoritative for all of our TLDs.  If you take that away, then a T1 is 
no different from a T2.  Many years ago OpenNic was run with the policy 
that only the master for a TLD would answer.  There were no backup 
copies maintained on other T1 servers.  Guess what happened every time 
one of the master servers went offline?  All resolution for every domain 
registered under that server's TLD became unavailable.  What you are 
proposing is that we move backwards and give up redundancy and 
reliability.  Why would anybody want that?

> Resolvers are trivial to set up compared to a tier 1 server. People 
> who decide to create a TLD need to be competent at running it by 
> themselves, and this is why we request them to have a tier 1 server to 
> prove as such. This hasn't been a barrier of entry to anyone so far I 
> don't think.
Actually it HAS been a barrier, and it is supposed to be a barrier. As 
you say, there needs to be a certain amount of competency with running 
DNS and maintaining a server in general before someone should be allowed 
to operate a TLD.  We've had our share of problems in the past, and new 
rules are created in response to those problems.  I see a lot of emails 
come across the mailing list where people think they're just going to 
walk in and create a new TLD without any knowledge of how BIND works, 
and sometimes without any understanding of how DNS works.  OpenNic is a 
project about learning, and many of us are more than happy to help 
people learn how to set up new TLDs on their own personal network, but 
the public DNS space is not the place to be experimenting and trying 
figure it out as you go... when we offer a public TLD for domain 
registration, people expect it to work.