Re: Topological Motivation for draft-ohta-root-servers-01.txt?

[marka@isc.org]

> Steve Mattson;
> 
> > Upon reading it, and previous versions of same, I have noticed the
> > repeated country-specific references as motivation for the draft.
> > However, it appears that the operational changes proposed in the
> > draft have very little to do with national borders but instead with
> > network topology issues involving adjacent AS's and BGP routing.
> 
> It reflects the fact that most of the current root servers are in US
> and people in US, seemingly, do not so much feel a lot of root
> servers necessary.
> 
> > I believe that a reworded motivation section of this draft based solely 
> > on network topology concerns would allow for a debate centered on the 
> > issue at hand.
> 
> The description explain the motivation. Abstract wording backed up by
> no real-world situation it useless.
> 
> It is a lot better to remove it totally than make it abstract.
> 

	I suspect that it would be better to say that the servers
	need to be distributed so that there is, in general, not
	the need to make inter-continental, trans-oceanic or
	satellite hops.  All of these types of links introduce
	large delays.

	I know there a political reasons at times to make the
	servers closer, but I believe the above critera technical
	critera should be used for determining how many root servers
	there are sharing a given unicast address and there rough
	placement.  The driving factor should be response times
	given an otherwise unloaded network.  Does < 100ms sound
	like a good figure?  While I don't know what the Atlantic
	adds to the RTT. I do know that satellites add ~400ms and
	the Pacific ~200ms.

	From an experimental point, BIND uses bands 128ms wide with
	the smallest band 64ms wide to select which nameserver to
	choose and it does a reasonable job of keeping named talking
	to the closest servers.  The size of these bands is adjustable
	at compile time.

> > This would allow the draft to proceed without having to 
> > address what is "internationally fair" or how to determine an evolving 
> > weight factor for the default set of root servers which one overrides 
> > selectively within one's "local" Internet.
> 
> What do you mean "local" Internet?
> 
> The proposal is for the global Internet.
> 
> > At the very least a statement 
> > could be added to this i-d which specifically declared the determination 
> > of the default set of root servers, or the default scope of those root 
> > server addresses not otherwise overridden, as being beyond the scope of 
> > the draft.
> 
> It is determined to be an empty set.
> 
> The i-d specifically declares that all the root server addresses can
> be overridden.
> 
> > Apologies if I've only added to the current confusion,
> 
> Don't mind. I certainly hate confusion but love chaos.
> 
> 							Masataka Ohta
> 
--
Mark Andrews, Internet Software Consortium
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka@isc.org