[Gllug] FQDN for local mail relay?

[Nix]

On 20 Dec 2006, Martin A. Brooks uttered the following:

> Juergen Schinker wrote:
>> for them to go down ....
>> you won't be able to surf the internet or send a mail
>> if you rely on them
>
> Either I'm fundamentally misunderstanding you, or you misunderstand
> how the Superinformation Highweb works.  I'm assuming it's the former,
> please clarify.

Well, if *all* the root servers die, that's true. Eventually. However,
there are a *lot* of unlikelinesses in there.

It is a common misconception among people who've just met the Internet
and heard that there *are* root servers to assume that `oh dear, if they
go down we're all dead': I had this impression once, but it's thankfully
wrong. For starters, there are now, I don't know, hundreds of root
nameservers (load-balancing via the nifty trick which is anycasting)
operated by a couple of dozen organizations, some of whom are in Europe
(those operated by NORDUnet and RIPE, for instance), and many of whom
are famously independently-minded (the ISC certainly counts as `run by
old-fart curmudgeons around since the Internet was young'). Pretty much
nothing other than EMPing the world outside Africa would take them all
down at once. Some of the root nameservers are in the London Docklands,
for instance: I doubt the US will be conquering London anytime soon
(they're too scared of Ken).

Even if you did take them all down somehow (magic?), DNS servers cache
results (without that the network would be totally nonscalable), and
until the caches started to expire en masse, you'd notice few
problems. You'd have days, minimum, and people would have a heap of new
root servers up on the same IP address via different connectivity within
*hours*. ISPs would notice, but users wouldn't.)


You might want to read e.g. <http://www.isoc.org/briefings/020/>
(slightly out of date but still fundamentally accurate, I believe).

-- 
`He accused the FSF of being "something of a hypocrit", which
 shows that he neither understands hypocrisy nor can spell.'
   --- jimmybgood
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