Taking a step back from the detailed discussion, it seems we don't have any major objections from the UK community to the proposals for deploying this I circulated last week, so I feel happy to take them to the RIPE DNS WG to take them a step further. We have offers of resources from VBCnet and NOMINET in the form of server hardware and operational support, and various LINX members as regards transit. We have support in principle from LINX, ISPA & NOMINET. Here's what I think the outstanding issues are: - fitting it all in to the European and Global picture: - for further discussion - routing policy for the NS ? various points here: - do we put the server in the LINX AS, or create a new one ? For this point it is worth remembering the reason we have the LINX AS in the first place, namely: 1. To make the LINX LAN prefix visible to the rest of the world 2. To give the LINX secretariat Internet connectivity 3. To have something everyone can peer with to gather useful stats in the collector. I don't think there are any sacred cows for any of these here - if we adjust the LINX policy to meet requirements of the root NS rather than the other way around, I don't think we break either of 1 or 2. I don't think it breaks 3. either, but this requirement will go away when we have a route server in any case. i.e. I am very appreciative of the existing LINX members who give transit to the LINX, but, it would not break my heart to have the same connectivity/policy for the LINX as a UK-based root NS, and would understand if the existing providers did not want to fully transit a root servers' traffic - we have had enough offers to transit the root NS I do not see this as a problem. - how many members should provide transit to the root NS AS ? we have appear to have 2 schools of thought here, namely that either everyone should transit the thing to spread the load as evenly as possible, or that we should only have a small number to keep the routing deterministic (there's also a 3rd more wacky suggestion to do some special local hack, but I tend to agree with Paul Vixie's comments on that). My view is that we have to be careful about too many members providing transit, as we can easily finish up with lots of views of the way to the LINX AS with equal path lengths, but non-obvious tie-breaks, leading to hard to predict connectivity. Also increasing the number of path/prefix products in the global routing tables is in any case ecologically unsound. Perhaps the solution is for a small number of well-connected LINX members to provide universal transit, but for an additional group to provide additional transit to specific places (like the Nacamar offer). (Further discussion of server routing policy is probably best confined to technical forums, i.e. maybe nom-dir and ispa-com want to be dropped off the distribution.) - server for just "." or TLDs ? This kind of ties in with routing policy, in that those providing transit have potential concerns about traffic levels generated by a TLD server . One solution here might be PeterL's suggestion of seperate servers for TLD and ".", with different members providing different transit to each. The TLD server does not need to have its own independent address space in the same way the "." one does. I think we can still get away with having them in the same AS, though there is some risk of asymmetry here. All we need is an additional offer of server hardware..... - router hardware We do need to think about upgrading the collector to a 64Mb- capable box, most likely a 7200. If we think that a 100Mb connection for the server is needed, then the is a spare slot in the collector for an FDDI or 100baseT card. I'm sure there was another point to make, but being in the RIPE terminal room is distracting me a bit. More discussion of this here tomorrow. Keith