if we do a mapping/hashing thing, we'll do it in the root servers in a way that the clients will not even have to see. solving the ".COM is full" problem from the point of view of the root servers won't require any kind of protocol or user visible change.

(i hope that folks are noticing, appreciating, and planning to emulate my editing of the headers (i remove all recipients except "nanog"). the happy result is that each of you gets only one copy of each thing i submit. the unhappy alternative is that every time i reply to something on this thread, i end up getting two copies of all subsequent followups.)

How does this lighten the load on the root servers?

it means that .COM doesn't have to be a single zone. which in turn means that not all the root servers have to carry all the .COM delegations. it also makes BIND behave better but that's just an implementation issue and i could fix it in other ways (and will have to fix it in other ways.)

In message <9508012156.AA16197@gw.home.vix.com>, Paul A Vixie writes:

if we do a mapping/hashing thing, we'll do it in the root servers in a way that the clients will not even have to see. solving the ".COM is full" problem from the point of view of the root servers won't require any kind of protocol or user visible change.

Paul, The point is that people will continue to use their SunOS 3.5, Xenix286, and BellTechnologies Unix, IDRIS, or whatever archane old Unix flavor they have and if it has a resolver at all it won't know the first thing about hashing anything. Those folks that can't recompile their applications can type cisco.ci.com, and do their part to add a level of hierarchy, but they aren't going to be happy computing a hash function and typing that in as a DNS name. Curtis

The point is that people will continue to use their SunOS 3.5, Xenix286, and BellTechnologies Unix, IDRIS, or whatever archane old Unix flavor they have and if it has a resolver at all it won't know the first thing about hashing anything. Those folks that can't recompile their applications can type cisco.ci.com, and do their part to add a level of hierarchy, but they aren't going to be happy computing a hash function and typing that in as a DNS name.

I believe that Paul's suggestion was that this level of hashing or the additional heirarchy be hidden within the root name servers. I.e., a request to ns.internic.net for cisco.com would get translated within their named to cisco.ci.com and sent off to ns-ci-com.whoever, who would then pass the info back as "cisco.com" to avoid confusing anyone. Such a change is easy (*cough*) to impliment in a limited fashion on a few root servers, as long as what gets back to the end users is still "cisco.com", which this idea would do. It just puts a transparent additional level of heirarchy in, hidden behind the root servers. -george george william herbert gherbert@crl.com KD6WUQ Unix / Internet Consultant http://www.crl.com/~gherbert