OT: Nine Root Servers?

[Doug Kanter]

Sorry about posting this here, but maybe some of you MVPs can shed some
light on this. From a news article:

"Ken Silva, the chief security officer for VeriSign Inc., compared the scale
of attacks to the damage caused in October 2002 when nine of the 13 computer
"root" servers that manage global Internet traffic were crippled by a
powerful electronic attack. VeriSign operates two of the 13 root server
computers, but its machines were unaffected."

Nine computers run the whole world's internet traffic? What sorts of
machines are these likely to be? And why just nine?

 

[Kerry Brown]

Sorry about posting this here, but maybe some of you MVPs can shed
some light on this. From a news article:

"Ken Silva, the chief security officer for VeriSign Inc., compared
the scale of attacks to the damage caused in October 2002 when nine
of the 13 computer "root" servers that manage global Internet traffic
were crippled by a powerful electronic attack. VeriSign operates two
of the 13 root server computers, but its machines were unaffected."

Nine computers run the whole world's internet traffic? What sorts of
machines are these likely to be? And why just nine?

Root DNS servers. There's thirteen. Nine were attacked.

http://www.sans.org/rr/whitepapers/dns/991.php

Kerry

 

[Bob I]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver

 

[Tim Slattery]

Sorry about posting this here, but maybe some of you MVPs can shed some
light on this. From a news article:

"Ken Silva, the chief security officer for VeriSign Inc., compared the scale
of attacks to the damage caused in October 2002 when nine of the 13 computer
"root" servers that manage global Internet traffic were crippled by a
powerful electronic attack. VeriSign operates two of the 13 root server
computers, but its machines were unaffected."

Nine computers run the whole world's internet traffic? What sorts of
machines are these likely to be? And why just nine?

No. There are thirteen root servers for the DNS system. That's the
distributed database that translates domain names (like
www.microsoft.com) to IP addresses (like 207.46.199.60). The great
majority of DNS inquries are resolved without going to a root server,
and once the IP address is obtained, the connection is made without
further involvement of the DNS system.

 

[Doug Kanter]

No. There are thirteen root servers for the DNS system. That's the
distributed database that translates domain names (like
www.microsoft.com) to IP addresses (like 207.46.199.60). The great
majority of DNS inquries are resolved without going to a root server,
and once the IP address is obtained, the connection is made without
further involvement of the DNS system.

Right - I misquoted the article. Still....seems odd that 13 computers run
this whole mess. So many users, it seems like not enough redundancy.

 

[Bob I]

Right - I misquoted the article. Still....seems odd that 13 computers run
this whole mess. So many users, it seems like not enough redundancy.

You saying that it's too simple to work? I think perhaps you are trying
to make it more complicated than it is.