Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 21:02:14 -0500 (EST) From: Andrew Partan <asp@partan.com>

Can someone spell out a bit more the reason behind exempting the routes that the root servers live in from being damped? Why should they get special treatment? And why just them (and the rest of the hosts that happen to live in those prefixes)?

There are a lot of root servers; if you can't reach some of them, so what?

Hi Andrew, we've been through this a couple of times. You are perfectly right, that, at least in principle, there should be enough redundancy for root nameservers. Though, in fact we are still facing a situation where, at least outside USA, large parts of the Internet are seeing all of them through the same one or two backbone/upstream links (sea cable) and any instability of those links which is triggering damping would unnecessarily prolong the inaccessibility of the root nameservers for an hour (at least those sitting in a /24 or longer prefix). Therefore we decided to define those "golden networks". Probably we could remove the exemptions for the A, D and H servers, which are sitting in a /16. We might consider this for a new version of the recommendation. Our recommendation is just dealing with a minimum set of "golden networks" which of course might be extended by local decision. I'm now finishing the Version 1.0 of the paper, considering all other comments received so far. Any further input is still welcome and will be considered for an updated version which, if needed, may be expected for autumn this year. Kind regards CP --- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --- --- Christian Panigl : Vienna University Computer Center - ACOnet --- --- VUCC - ACOnet - VIX : -------------------------------------------- --- --- Universitaetsstrasse 7 : Mail: Panigl@CC.UniVie.ac.at (CP8-RIPE) --- --- A-1010 Vienna / Austria : Tel: +43 1 4277-14032 (Fax: -9140) --- --- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---