On Wed, 19 Feb 1997, George Herbert wrote:
It's not like failing to reach f.root-servers.net will deny service to anyone (you try g, h, a, b... if you can't get through). If this were more widely deployed to more of them that might be cause for some complaint by the spammers that they were being discriminated against. But one of the 15 or so being unavailable to... let's see, counting it up it looks like around 12 class C sized nets and 4 individual host machines is barely a statistical blip. In the worst case, DNS lookups at those sites take twice as long in 1 in 15 cases, and much less in practice if their lookup software has any brains and stops querrying roots it doesn't get responses from.
Sigh.. the point is that we have 9 (or so) root servers right now. All of those can be counted on to provide name service for anybody for anything, assuming of course that the network is okay. When someone starts blocking certain sites' access, then we basically have 8 servers. Sooner or later, someone else will decide to start blocking. Then we'll have 7. And so on, until everyone has to use different root servers. If you claim to be a root server with data for everyone, you should damn well provide that data to everyone. Otherwise, you have no right to pose as one of the root servers. shag Judd Bourgeois PGP key ID 0xEDC21CA1 shagboy@world.std.com 25DDE4AF C5AFEF51 6905DC77 360F0387 To all my friends - It's not the end The earth has not swallowed me yet - 311, "Freak Out"