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[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

Note that in addition to redundancy, you also want to consider geographic location.  We have a few T1s in the US, a few in Europe, a few in AU... This allows some flexibility for the T2 operators to control where their queries fall back to, and help maintain decent response times.  If we had 10 T1s all sitting in Germany, then yes I would agree this would be overkill and provide nothing to OpenNic.  The same holds true with T2 servers, and in the past I have spoken to people about how pointless it is to run 10 servers out of the same hosting facility.  Redundancy is only as good as the diversity it is based on, so as long as we keep servers spread out to a wider geographic area, having a large number of both T1 and T2 servers is still useful.

And no, the end comments were not directed at you.  I've talked to many people on IRC over the years who have come in expecting to point-and-click their way to a shiny new TLD, only to leave the channel angry when they find out it actually takes 'work' to set up and maintain.  This is an ongoing problem, and always has been, so there have been rules added over the years to try and prevent people with only a passing interest and limited knowledge from being put in a position that they can't handle.  Consider if we just let anyone create a TLD on the fly...  When the .pirate zone originally opened up, there were thousands of domains created by people who never even came back to see if they worked (and this is exactly the reason why I enacted the initial 28-day registration period on all of the domains I help manage).  It's great that people want to come through and play with the toys we have created, but we should NOT cater to the requests of people who lose interest after 5 minutes of playing around.  If someone is interested enough to come back and start asking questions, those are the people who I want to help, the people who I want to provide the resources to help maintain their interest with the project and make it a fun thing to get involved with.  We can set rules to protect the project as a whole without making things so difficult that newcomers are driven away.

On 07/25/2014 04:37 AM, Alejandro Bonet wrote:

Dear Jeff Taylor:

This is the key question, we (you and me) will never agree: Your
personal point of view and my personal point of view are different in
this question.

You say: "It is better to distinguish between T1 and T2, because T1
are redundant and authoritative, and T2 are not".

And i say: "Well, you can 'categorize' the servers as you want, but
they are only servers. If you want redundance to get reliability, you
dont need 10 T1s redundance for each TLD. You only need two or three
servers for each TLD, and you will get almost the same redundance as
with ten servers (because when the two or three servers hang
simultaneously, then probably the problem is global, and it can hang
ten or twenty servers also). And, in respect to authoritative
responses, if you have ten authoritative servers for a TLD, the
probability of inconsistence in responses, is 5 (or 3.3) times greater
than if you only have two or three authoritative servers for that TLD.
Also if you need to replicate each complete TLD zone file in each T1
server, and requiring a T1 (as authoritative and redundant) server for
each TLD, this will run well with ten TLDs, but not with 5000 TLDs."

This discussion will never ends: You have your opinion, and i have mine.

Both have advantages and disadvantages, at different scales.

The main diference is only "in style".

(About the "argument of authority" in the sense that "there are people
just going walk in and create a new TLD without any knowledge of how
BIND works, and sometimes without any understanding of how DNS works",
i dont know if you are saying this for me, but i only want to say you
i wrote a DNS client for arduino some years ago, and it is running
perfectly since that, on many installations, 24h/365d).

From scratch. Building and parsing complete DNS-QUERY/RESPONSE UDP
packets, field by field, bit by bit, on 16 bit tedious microprocessor
assembler language, with redudant compression of domains, of course.

Alejandro Bonet
albogoal AT gmail.com

http://registro.ibu

ns1.ibu: 87.216.170.85
ns2.ibu: 185.16.40.143

Since August 2013


2014-07-14 17:48 GMT+02:00, 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.

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