Re: DNS ROOT understanding

bortzmeyer@nic.fr:
> Pure curiosity from me: who is this "large group"? Is it formally
> incorporated / chartered / etc? Or is it just an informal group of
> friends? Do they publish things like statistics of response times?

It's not a group of "friends", it's a group of "enemies". :-)

(No, I'm just kidding. :-)

Of course we do monitoring ourselves, and some root ops also check the
other roots, just for good measure ("I" does). Since we're dispersed
over time zones, we can help each other. The night shift in
Stockholm, is the day shift in Tokyo, etc. Some are staffed 24x7,
some are not.

Apart form that, there are a few "official" organizations that do
various types of measurements. RIPE NCC is one, CAIDA is another, and
there are a few more, that don't come to mind at this hour. You can
find some stats on http://dnsmon.ripe.net/ and http://www.caida.org/.
A few of the roots publish stats themselves ("I" doesn't, but we plan
to, manpower problem).

On top of these more or less "formal" groups, there is a club of
individuals who happen to be interested in DNS, and the roots
specifically. Most of these people I do not know, and I don't even
know that they're watching, until something breaks, and I receive a
bunch of e-mail messages from people I've never heard of, pointing
out the problem. This is usually a good thing ... under two
conditions:

1) The "watching" doesn't harm the official service.

2) The number of watchers is reasonable.

"1)" is usually a consequence of "2)".

If the number of wathers grows to be too big, we're going to end up
with a system where all we do is watch it. The root servers become the
Hollywood celebrities of the Internet, and, like the movie stars, they
won't be able to live a normal life (= perform good service).

So, please, be conservative in what you dump on the poor root
servers. We try to perform an important service on the Internet, but
if you all jump on top of us, it's going to be unnecessarily hard for
us to breathe.

Best regards,
/Liman