There's a lot of smoke going around this list and others about the root servers. The internic generated a corrupt zone file on Tuesday which Bind did not load and prevented XFERs to the secondaries. We became aware of it last night and it is currently fixed. New zones will be ready for XFER within the next hour. The issue with requiring a login for retrieving the zone files was designed to help reduce spamming. We are currently experiencing a huge system load due to several individuals who are trying to register recently deleted domain names. The requests are being repeated and fired off every few milliseconds. One individual has over 50,000 templates in the system as we speak. We believe that by requiring an identity to download the zone files we will better protect the community. Note that this ftp policy has not yet gone into effect. Lastly, it appears irresponsible to fan the flames of "the internic is trying to get over" via lists like these. How about giving us the benefit of the doubt? We generally stay silent on these issues, but feel that it is important to explain what we are doing and why. No, we are not trying to take over the net. Sorry for the confusion. David H. Holtzman Senior VP Engineering, NSI dholtz@internic.net