Havard,

Havard Eidnes wrote: I have to ask a rhetorical question here, what is a "block" in this context? Is it a single routing announcement? Surely, it cannot be, because the different root name servers are placed at different points in the topology.

The very purpose of placing them at different points is to have redundancy; so yes, for the same reason they must have different blocks.

I'll claim that the actual numeric sequence (or non-sequence) of the IPv6 address blocks allocated to the root name servers do not matter; the identity of the blocks will be well-known anyway, so there is no robustness gain to be had from picking "obscure" or "scattered" numbers.

There is an advantage to scattered numbers, IMHO. Since they are scattered, nobody will try to aggregate them and suppress the specific announcements. Martian configs do happen; not often but they do.

I do however agree with those which have said that a root name server should not have its address changed when it moves between RIR regions; the whole point of this "special" assignment to the root name servers is to avoid *any* renumbering because the DNS bootstrap data is (currently) distributed in a static configuration file.

There are (at least) two ways to achieve this: 1. Two-space systems (the servers would have a unique identifier and multiple changeable locators). 2. "special assignement" otherwise called PI. I think the RIRs have acted responsibly so far in not showing the bad example of allocating themselves a PI block. A short-term fix to this would be a two-space system where the locator initially assigned could be transformed into the identifier later. Michel.