On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 10:20:13PM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote:
On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, Mark Andrews wrote:
Do I need to modify our cache server configuration to enable it?
Only if you wish to do all your other customers a disfavour by configuring your caching servers to support a private namespace then yes.
There's no particular technical magic to the ICANN-run roots, except that it's what just about everybody else is using. This means that if you enter the same hostname on two computers far away from each other, you're probably going to end up at the same place, or at least at places run by the same organization. This standardization is valuable, so anybody trying to make a different standard that isn't widely used compete with it is going to have a hard time convincing people to switch.
That doesn't mean a competing system wouldn't work, for those who are using it. They'd just be limited in who they could talk to, and that generally wouldn't be very appealing.
Well, Steve; that reply is a *little* disingenuous: all of the alternative root zones and root server clusters that *I'm* aware of track the ICANN root, except in the rare instances where there are TLD collisions. I'm not aware of any such specific collisions; I stopped tracking that area when NetSol shutdown that mailing list without warning several years ago. I merely observe that they're possible.
A system that would limit my ability to talk to people in other countries doesn't sound very appealing to me. On the other hand, the Chinese government has been trying hard to limit or control communications between people in China and the rest of the world for years. In that sense, maintaining their own DNS root, incompatible with the rest of the world, might be seen as a considerable advantage. If they don't care about breaking compatibility with the DNS root the rest of the world uses, the disadvantages of such a scheme become fairly moot.
Eric Raymond, that polarizing ambassador for open source, likes to disseminate the word (and concept) "conflating" -- that being the habit, or attempt, by an arguer of a point to hook together two related but distinct concepts that may both be involved in a topic, but may not have the cause and effect relationship being implied by said arguer. This is a good example, IMHO: Even if China *did* maintain their own root, unless they also maintained their own copies of the 2LD's, like .com, they couldn't snip out *specific* sites they didn't want people to see. But the whole "there's a non-ICANN root: the sky is falling" thing is an argument cooked up to scare the unwashed; us old wallas don't buy it. I just hope none of the unwashed *press* decide to blow the lid off of it; the public's lack of understanding of the underpinnings of the net is painful enough now... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Designer +-Internetworking------+----------+ RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates | Best Practices Wiki | | '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://bestpractices.wikicities.com +1 727 647 1274 If you can read this... thank a system administrator. Or two. --me