Re: Useful Comments Re: DNSO process and Drafts submitted to ICANN

["Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

At 12:16 PM 2/8/99 -0500, Michael Sondow wrote:
>Roeland M.J. Meyer a écrit:
>
>> Anyone with knowledge, a Unix system, and a full-time Internet connection
>> can do the same.
>
>Do the average domain name holders have the knowledge, a Unix machine, and
>an Internet connection of their own? If not, what is the point to this
>discussion?

Actually, this is a very interesting question. At one time the answer was
an unqualified "yes". This was before NSI started marketing dot COM and the
rise of the web. Now  many users are strictly dependent on their ISP for
this. This presents a problem for the ISP and SLD registration software
does not exist and many ISP have to add DNS changes via hand editing
process. For a domain that may be on a LAN, with a lot of workstation
movement, this becomes a time-intensive nightmare for the ISP.

There is some argument that one can use a Windows machine  for primary DNS.
At MHSC, we've never tried this. We've always found either Linux or OS/2 to
be much more reliable, for server operations.

It is very certain that in order to serve DNS, one needs a static IP
address for at least two name servers, according to the RFCs. For those in
dynamic IP land, this becomes a serious problem. They must find, or pay
for, a host with a permanent static IP connection. This is the primary
barrier to entry. With such a host, one can arrange secondary DNS services
with ones ISP, as part of the "bandwidth" arrangement. This provides the
second name server. Note that the primary can still be behind a dynamic IP
connection. MHSC, in the early daze, did exactly this. It is called a
ghosted connection (We had a part-time ISDN connection to InterNex at the
time) and everything is spooled at the ISP site. We still retain a
variation of this for our private TLDs, many of which are using UUCP-style
connections (they are ghosts). 

The down-side is that it takes a fair amount of technical expertise to
maintain such a connection, on both sides of the link. Many ISPs have lost
the capability to do this (Internex sure has and so has Netcom, our current
upstream does not have this expertise either). The result is that now the
customer has to supply the relevant expertise. This is just barely
workable. In addition, it also takes additional server capacity. MHSC has
about 90 GB of RAID5 spool space for this.


___________________________________________________ 
Roeland M.J. Meyer - 
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