Below I'll make a comparison with what you state in your message and the situation on ns.EU.net. First let me summarize: Regarding manpower, not very much is needed in hours, more in alertness. Clear, but part of it can be automated. And when looking at hardware, a SparcStation 1 with 500M disk and 16M memory will do. See below. The crucial point is the connectivity, this must be good, otherwise there is not much use adding one more root server. Speaks for itself. 1) manpower ...the only thing that must be done/checked is to pickup the new zone files from nic.ddn.mil (with ftp, zone-transfers won't do). This can be made with a script (a mail message is sent when the new files are available), even if I prefer to do it manually as the transfer fails every now and then (or the zone files themself can be corrupt/ truncated). .... This can mostly be reliably automated; it's comparable to how ns.EU.net constructs its named.boot file every night from -amongst other things- a list of domains it runs secondary for and that it receives from uunet. 2) hardware NIC.NORDU.NET is a SparcStation 1, and this works nice (we tried an ELC, but that didn't really work, don't know if it was the e-net interface or what, but it didn't really manage the load). Interesting, but: If it is only used for the name server, I would say that 16M memory will do, BIND tends to get big, lots of cache. Maybe it will do for a machine that runs *only* root server, but not if it has to run primary/secondary for a bunch of other domains too. By comparison: ns.EU.net is an ELC; it runs BIND 4.8.3; it runs primary/secondary for some 1700 domains; the SIZE and RSS are around 10M on the average but can go well above 15M; queries/day average between 200,000 and 1,200,000. Crucial point is swapping, which has to be avoided at all cost. Which means 16M of memory just isn't enough, especially when you take into consideration that things like zone transfers by secondary servers off ns.EU.net cause the named process to fork off *the complete core image*. Even the current 24M in ns.EU.net isn't enough to cope with that, so we're about to upgrade it to 40M of memory. Piet