Servers and zones are part of the physical instancing of DNS roots. The definition of the root precedes the instance. In short, the definition of a naming structure is disjoint from the delivery and usage of that structure, be it servers and zones or whatever. Regarding the separation of servers and zones, this is already common practice. BIND provides a good example of this. With BIND, one can serve an arbitrary set of zones from an arbitrary set of servers, subject to the ability to do zone transfers. So there is obvious separation. Cutler At 11:35 PM 7/9/2005, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: On Sat, Jul 09, 2005 at 06:08:25PM -0400, James R. Cutler wrote:

Actually, many naming and addressing management experts consider that the existence of a root defines a unique namespace.

The existence of a root *zone* yes. We really should separate root *servers* from *root* zones. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 If you can read this... thank a system administrator. Or two. --me - James R. Cutler james.cutler@consultant.com