At Friday 10:24 AM 8/25/00, "Verd, Brad" <bverd@netsol.com> wrote:
NSI is modifying the current zone generation process to eliminate the existing small interval during which the com zone database file is not present on this nameserver. Until then, NSI is manually querying the root zone to ensure no delegations have been automatically dropped.
It's unbelievable how people cling to inadequate solutions that no longer serve their needs adequately. Why are we still relying on the zone AXFR mechanism with plain, unauthenticated TCP transfers going to or from IP host that could temporarily be located in outer Mongolia (no offense) if one decides to use BGP announcements as a temporary "relocator"? Strategically such relocation would happen minutes before such zone transfers start. There is a small number of zones that are too important to go missing, corrupted or hijacked: Why are these all-important zones not transferred via a secure (and likely freely available) mechanism like SCP (part of ssh) using RSA authentication? Why isn't the same done for a checksum file for each zone, which is then compared to the transferred file, with DNS servers only reloading the zone on a SIGHUP once the authenticity and correctness of the zone has been confirmed? The number of parameters to verify correctness should be in the single digits: approximate length of zone(s), serial #, presence of zone(s), SOA info, other cursory checks. Anything missing? Pages should be blasted out to key people within seconds, and the server detecting the fault should hold "status quo" until it either solves the problem itself, or receives manual help. All of this takes at most a few hours to implement : whip up a bunch of Perl scripts (throw in a few weeks of beta testing!), it won't work less reliable than what we have right now, apparently : I have done similar secure shuttling of files for applications in the financial industry where correctness and prevention of loss in transport was everything, but timing came right after. That software is still in use today, with (as I believe) virtually no maintenance or bugfixes applied in the last 2 years, and what could have been 10KB of code, became about 50 as interaction with an NT server was required...