Discuss mailing list

[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

Actually the only ones who believe the Earth was the center of the universe were the religious nutjobs who wanted to control everyone with the belief that they are important.  This is right up there with the common belief that in the time of Christopher Columbus (mis-credited with discovering America), everyone believed that the world was flat.  The truth is that sailors have been using circumnavigation for much longer, instead of using what would appear to be a straight path if you were looking at a flat-world map.

OpenNIC is not "my" project.  In fact the person originally responsible for creating it is not longer with the project.  Yes there are a few people who make changes and do a lot of work behind the scenes, but those changes are made in the interests and desires of the community.  Brian set up the T2 wiki page in response to the request for a centralized location for that information.  I created the reports page based on requests to keep track of what servers were available or experiencing problems.  The entire collection of everything that makes up OpenNic is mostly based on pieces that were created by individuals to fill a need.  You see some names more often that others because those people take a more active role in developing the tools or the policies or spreading the word about our project.

You say you want to see the project grow with more servers, and yet you were just arguing *against* having so many servers.  And what is the point of having more TLDs if we can't get people interested in creating original content on the domains they have registered?  We have had literally thousands of domains registered under .free and .pirate and yet you would have to look very hard to find even a single original page, and a large portion of registered domains don't even point to websites.  Diversity in TLDs is only useful if content is being created.

On 07/28/2014 09:30 AM, Alejandro Bonet wrote:

This is good Jeff: "the people who i want to provide the resources to
help maintain their interest".

But i know a guy who translated the whole wiki into spanish, and with
no reasons, this translation is not online eight months after it was
done...

I dont know if this is your project, our project, or the project for
ten "privileged" tlds owners...

But if it is my project i want to see it growing (with more servers,
more tlds, more people and more ideas)...

Quinn: At year 1500, the only one who says "Earth is not the center:
SUN is the center", was Nicolas Copernico.

Nobody understood him then... But he was RIGHT.

Evidently im not Copernico.

But this could be a good example to show us that "The more number of
believers is not necesarily a good measure for the truth, or a good
reason to believe".



2014-07-26 4:28 GMT+02:00, 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.




--------
You are a member of the OpenNIC Discuss list.
You may unsubscribe by emailing
discuss-unsubscribe AT lists.opennicproject.org

--------
You are a member of the OpenNIC Discuss list. 
You may unsubscribe by emailing discuss-unsubscribe AT lists.opennicproject.org