Re: [ga] who are the root server operators?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 07:07:11PM -0500,
 Joe Baptista <baptista@dot-god.com> wrote 
 a message of 33 lines which said:

> > Are there any plans to expand the list of root-servers, maybe to 26
> > from 13, for greater internet stability?
> 
> they can't.  the limit is 13 mainly due to protocol limitations.

I'm not aware of any such limitation in the DNS protocol. Read RFC
1035. 

If you refer to the 512-bytes limit of UDP packets (you can check the
size of the current root with 'dig . ns' and read the MSG SIZE field:
there is room for two more servers), I do not regard it as a good
reason:

* with DNSSEC (cryptographical signatures in the DNS replies) and IDN
  (long labels), the DNS will have to move to TCP anyway,

* there is never a DNS query for the root name servers: they are
  hardwired in the hints file (/etc/bind/db.root or something like
  that). Unlike the TLD name servers (which ICANN limit to 13 per
  TLD), there is no good technical reason to limit the number of root
  name servers.



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