David Holtzman wrote:

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.

Thank you for the information.

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.

Also thank you for the information...

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.

I had some long conversations with Chuck Gomes there following the great PR debacle of the InterNIC billing cleanup earlier this year. One of the aspects of this covered the need for more proactive information releases by InterNIC when things go wrong. InterNIC, being a singular and critical resource, is in a particularly touchy situation with regards to the general question of trust on the internet. What with all the policy issues that are also flying, as well as a moderately bad history (some of which was bad PR/info release rather than actual problems), InterNIC suffers from an ongoing problem that large segments of the network operator community fear you. That is, obviously, not a good thing to have. The only solution is that InterNIC has to become actively proactive about informing the community when things go wrong. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that at the very least the operators of all the root nameservers should have had the problem report mailed to them on Tuesday, if not made more publically available via the nanog mailing list, etc. Again, I urge InterNIC to understand how important it is that you push this information out to people rather than have us get flustered and come looking for it when things go wrong. -george william herbert gherbert@crl.com