placement of secondary name servers for .uk.

[Peter Gradwell <peter@gradwell.com>]

Hi,

Nominet is the .uk. Domain name Registry and I am part of it's policy advisory
group. A bunch of people who attempt to say wise things when asked difficult
questions. We have recently been asked by Nominet to give advice on the 
placement
of the secondary name servers for the .uk domain name.

- Currently this is done on a "traditional" and "cooperative" basis. The 
question
is whether it needs to be formalised (the lawyers probably think so) and if so
who should be asked to tender.

Currently, I'm seeking advice on the following points, and should be grateful
for your views:

a)      What is the traffic profile for DNS queries? For example, should we put
         servers in asia? What weighting in terms of numbers of servers should
         we give to the UK/Europe/East Coast/West Coast/Mid US ?

- I notice that CAIDA made a report to the RSSAC, in October 1999
http://www.caida.org/tools/measurement/skitter/RSSAC/

- Does anyone know if they made any subsequent reports?

b)      Should DNS servers be placed on the transit LANS of Exchange Points,
         or should they be hosted at the premises of ISPs? Can they be "one 
hop"
         from an EP, but at an ISP's datacentre (for ease of management). What
         if that ISP doesn't have an open peering policy? Or if they block 
some
         traffic (RBL) ?

I understand that the root server advisory committee is asking similar 
questions
for ICANN. I assume that other registries may be doing the same. If anyone
else is currently considering these issues, please let me know  - perhaps we
can pool brains and produce a combined strategy?

thanks

peter

--
peter gradwell; online @ http://www.gradwell.com/peter/