The Root has got an A record

Peter_Karin_Dambier · October 10, 2005, 3:03pm

See with your own eyes:

; <<>> DiG 9.1.3 <<>> -t any . @a.public-root.net
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 18588
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 15, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;. IN ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
. 172800 IN SOA a.public-root.net. hostmaster.public-root.net.\
2005101006 43200 3600 1209600 14400
. 172800 IN A 57.67.193.188
. 172800 IN NS k.public-root.net.
. ...
. 172800 IN NS j.public-root.net.

;; Query time: 81 msec
;; SERVER: 205.189.71.2#53(a.public-root.net)
;; WHEN: Mon Oct 10 16:01:11 2005

Stephen_J_Wilcox1 · October 10, 2005, 3:11pm

i'm reading looking for your explanation but there isnt one.

and the A record is for what?

anyway its on a private dns server, the internet roots are fine so why worry?

Steve

Janet_Sullivan · October 10, 2005, 3:25pm

Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:

i'm reading looking for your explanation but there isnt one.

and the A record is for what?

The A record is for "." (the DNS root). Or at least "." as public-root sees it.

anyway its on a private dns server, the internet roots are fine so why worry?

It might impact people who have drunk enough of the public-root kool-aid to be using it instead of the ICANN root. For everyone else, its just more evidence that alternative roots are usually a bad idea.

Jon_Lewis1 · October 10, 2005, 3:51pm

See with your own eyes:

; <<>> DiG 9.1.3 <<>> -t any . @a.public-root.net

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 18588
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 15, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;. IN ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
. 172800 IN SOA a.public-root.net.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

hostmaster.public-root.net.\
2005101006 43200 3600 1209600 14400
. 172800 IN A 57.67.193.188

Who cares? Please stop wasting NANOG bandwidth that could be better used debating peering/depeering with gibberish about fringe DNS systems.

Report this to NANOG and the IETF. Make sure you send them a copy of my
response and the headers of this message. I am holding UNIDT personally
responsible for this technical nightmare.

Make sure to also report when pigs fly and the aliens decide to publicly make contact.

Apologies to anyone already .procmailrc'ing Peter to /dev/null for sneaking this into your inbox.

Peter_Karin_Dambier · October 10, 2005, 4:31pm

I am sorry if you feel annoyed by this, but

c.public-root.com, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, IP 68.255.182.111
e.public-root.com, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, IP 216.138.219.83
f.public-root.com, Terre Haute, Indiana, USA, IP 66.15.237.185
g.public-root.com, Chicago, Illinois, USA, IP 199.5.157.131
h.public-root.com, Des Moines, Iowa, USA, 64.198.89.245

operate in north america, in your network. So do their customers.
It is you who will be annoyed if anything goes wrong because of
this misbehaviour.

I do not recommend using the public-root right now. I do warn
because of obvious technical problems.

I dont know what happens if '.' suddenly has a valid ip address.
I have not written windows. I dont know what Bill Gates does.
My linux did complain. That is how I did find it in the first
place.

And I know for shure '.' was not meant to have an ip address.

What can go wrong will go wrong. I have seen enough queries
for '.local' and for 'localhost' on the root-servers.

Jon Lewis wrote:

See with your own eyes:

; <<>> DiG 9.1.3 <<>> -t any . @a.public-root.net

                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 18588
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 15, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;. IN ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
. 172800 IN SOA a.public-root.net.

                                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

hostmaster.public-root.net.\
                                               2005101006 43200 3600 1209600 14400
. 172800 IN A 57.67.193.188

Who cares? Please stop wasting NANOG bandwidth that could be better used debating peering/depeering with gibberish about fringe DNS systems.

Report this to NANOG and the IETF. Make sure you send them a copy of my
response and the headers of this message. I am holding UNIDT personally
responsible for this technical nightmare.

Make sure to also report when pigs fly and the aliens decide to publicly make contact.

Apologies to anyone already .procmailrc'ing Peter to /dev/null for sneaking this into your inbox.

Better /dev/null the rest of nanog too because I am afraid there will
raise issues because of this.

So, if you really dont care ...

Valdis_Kletnieks · October 10, 2005, 4:33pm

RFC1925 sayeth:

   (3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is
        not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
        are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
        as they fly overhead.

Obviously, what Peter was reporting is the result of a DNS administrator
sitting under the flight path of Porcine Airlines flight 109....

Jon_Lewis1 · October 10, 2005, 5:02pm

Where they operate or how many alternative root's there are really doesn't matter. Anyone nutty enough to rely on them gets what they have coming.

Todd_Vierling · October 10, 2005, 8:23pm

All you're doing is making the rest of us laugh uncontrollably as the
problems with the non-Internet "Public-Root" DNS servers keep stacking up.
The rest of us use actual *Internet* root DNS servers and will never see
these problems.

(I need to find my glasses, because that sign on the road ahead is hard to
read -- something about feeling droll? Wait, that's not right....)

Peter_Karin_Dambier · October 11, 2005, 8:32am

The A record for '.' is gone.

I am told it was a typo. I guess nameservers for at least one domain
where involved too. That is the reason why I had problems.

Kind regards,
Peter and Karin

Peter Dambier wrote:

Andre_Oppermann · October 11, 2005, 9:14am

Peter,

nobody here cares even the slightest bit for your "public-root" problems.

Please stop spamming NANOG lists NOW!

michael.dillon1 · October 11, 2005, 9:33am

nobody here cares even the slightest bit for your "public-root"

problems.

Please stop spamming NANOG lists NOW!

Seems to me that such appeals might be a bit more
effective if you sent it privately to the list
administrators via the address published here:
http://www.nanog.org/listadmins.html

--Michael Dillon

Bill_Stewart · October 13, 2005, 2:14am

Back in the mid-80s, when some people at Bell Labs were trying to get
the rest of us there onto the DNS bandwagon, there were some people
who didn't like it. Pike and Weinberger put out deep theoretical
papers like The Hideous Name on relative vs. absolute names and the
effects of syntax (available at
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/85/1-05.ps.gz ), and the Plan 9
naming structure, and Honeyman and Bellovin wrote pathalias to
optimize communication paths across bang-space and other namespaces.
I mainly grumbled about the unlikelihood of everybody being willing to
let some central authority decide whose machines could be named
gandalf and mozart given the current anarchic structure of uucp
naming, a prediction which proved resoundingly wrong over the next few
years as DNS took off like wildfire because it was obviously much more
convenient.

The main feature of a global hierarchical namespace root is that
"There Can Be Only One" (Highlander, 1986). That doesn't mean that
other people can't use the same syntax and software to describe a
different namespace that may overlap the Internet's namespace and may
resolve to the same addresses in many cases, and over the years there
have been occasional alternate-root namespaces grabbing a fraction of
a percent of the market, and sometimes they've even been administered
well enough that their few users don't all give up immediately. But
when they do something wrong with their "root", that doesn't mean that
there's anything wrong with "the" root - it just means that their
users may get unpredictable results, which is something they're mostly
used to anyway.

The DNS namespace is designed that lots of things can be grafted under
it, and much of the DNS name resolution software is designed to
resolve local as well as global names. So company example.com with
globally-named servers like engineering.example.com or
london.example.com can have users who refer to those servers as
"example" or "london" as long as they administer their DNS correctly.
And Joe-Bob's Alternate Root Services can have locally-usable names
like www.example.fun which are also globally accessible as
www.example.fun.joe-bob-alt-root-example.net by people who don't use
their name resolvers (again, if they configure everything correctly) -
but many of the alternate roots over the years haven't wanted to do
that, because it makes it obvious that they're not the "real" root,
just a wannabe.

There have been other global namespaces - ICQ was very popular for a
while, and it didn't get bothered by the WIPO-and-ICANN crowd because
nobody worried too much about trademark violations in a flat numerical
namespace that didn't correlate with anything else. On the other
hand, the ENUM proposals do have serious issues of namespace policy
and centralization-vs-decentralization - should their hierarchical
number space be forced to buy E.164 numbers from the Telco Gods?
Should anyone who has a PBX be able to manage ENUMs for extensions
under it, and should anybody with a phone number be able to define
ENUM numbers under it (e.g. 5.4.3.2.1.0.0.0.1.5.5.5.3.2.1.1 to get
extension 12345 at +1-123-555-1000, or fax.0.0.0.1.5.5.5.3.2.1.1 to
get the fax machine?)