You have just proven that at least one person in Australia is a moron...
As opposed to the guy in Nashville who we had believe that we all have kangaroos as pets, only have paved roads in Sydney and Melbourne, that we watch out all the time for crocs and killer koalas and go walkabouts for 3 months once every year. Even worse was when I was asked how long it took to drive to America.
Sad to say that a certain proportion (hopefully smaller than I think) of Americans know that the rest of the world exists bu
Zero. I mean the number zero. Arabic numbers. That thing used to navigation by stars. A culture of religious tolerance that used to acept jews hunted by the inquisition. Buildings designed to be cool in the desert. I mean before western introduced crusades and petrol. More recently I'm not well informed.
In fact the religous hate factor was increased because it is like a way of excape to the west supported orient dictatorships (like Saudi Arab monarchs, the Sha of Iran, etc). Western support dictatorships to keep the oil fuel. The people is oppresed, they goto religious extremists, the extremists attack west, west reacts and the wheel keeps turning.
I find it kind of funny that the rest of the world thinks we're ignorant
You are sort of simple minded aren't you. Just because you refuse to acknowledge their existence doesn't mean that they do not exist. You should visit "Euorotrash states" like Belgium, or France. They are really quite nice. Why don't you like Asia? What did Asia ever do to you? (and don't start in on the Bird Flue or SARS). Try not going to an 'amricanized' resort. You'll find that there are other, more interesting cultures, t
The number of countries outside the U.S. outnumber the number of countries inside the U.S.
I would have moderated parent Insightful, but unfortunately it was already on the limit. The US is not all the world, in fact it is not even one third of the world. My first thought when I read the head line was: "That was about time". We don't want too much control over the internt to lie in the hands of one country, no matter which country it is. I know the way DNS is designed it is still possible to mess up the s
I just changed bloody hosts three days ago and my DNS still isn't completely changed over! Now I find out it's because all the new servers are farting around in Frankfurt! Great, just great! =)~
Sure, there may be more DNS root servers outside the US, but it would seem that Verisign still has exclusive rights to muck around with them. So what's the big deal?
As i stated in the past the only reason verisign, ICANN or anyone else has DNS power is because everyone agrees to use their standard.. well.. not everybody;) there is a choice in the matter [unrated.net] anyone who wants to run a DNS server can do so and can map domains to whatever IP address they like... it's just that issuing conflicting domain names on different servers benifits nobody and makes things worse for everyone
In the bad old days you and you alone were in control of name resolution. For those of you without receding and/or grey hairlines who may not know or remember this, you had a file called hosts.txt that contained all the mappings of names to IPs. That, obviously, didn't scale and DNS was developed and was widely deployed by about 86 or so.
The one big gotcha with DNS is it takes control out of your hands. That is, you may have your own DNS server locally, but you traditionally refer to other servers that serve up the root zone that tells your DNS server where all the TLD servers are. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to use other machines, not your own, for this.
This is wrong for many reasons:
It's slower than if you have your own local copy of the root zone
it's a point of failure you can live without - a DDOS on the legacy roots shouldn't take you down
it provides a political point of capture - he who controls the root controls all the DNS namespace, and it's currently under the aegis of the trademark lobby under the guise of an incompetant and gutless wonder we jokingly refer to as "ICANN [google.com]".
But there are ways around this. The easiest if is you static route the 13 root server IPs to your own nameserver. Then you can run an unmodified copt of the legacy root zone [internic.net] on your own nameserver and the US government root servers can be backhoed or DDOS'd and you wouldn't even notice. ISP's are starting to figure this out, especiallly ones with expensive longhaul connections.
Or, you can modify your nameserver to declare youtself primary for the root zone (which you've dutifully downloaded) and edit out the declarations for "." in the legacy root zone.
Or you can use the ORSC root zone [vrx.net]. If it's good enough for two ICANN board members, it's good enough for you.
Whatever you do, for God's sake dump bind [vrx.net] and use DJBDNS [cr.yp.to]. It really is so much better it's just not funny.
Well, in a typical environment you're not talking to the root servers at all, but rather sending a recursive DNS query to an intermediate DNS server. This will be faster than handling the root zone yourself in many cases as your intermediate DNS server can handle many clients (see large ISP) and cache results.
I dunno what typical is or means. Even on a lowly W98 box I put Simple DNS+ [jhsoft.com] ($35) or, better, BIND PE [ntcanuck.com] (free) on it. And they will query the root servers to find where the pointers to say,.TH or.SK are.
Probably you mean most people just use their ISP's DNS servers. This is usualy not a terrific idea as most of these blow dead goats.
If you have a spare 386 or higher, deploy it as a dedicated DNS server (under Windows or *nix, it does't matter), primary the root on it and watch everything you do get just a
I've been using the ORSC root zone and its servers for several years. I have not noticed any outages or problems - oops, yes there was a problem once - it was when ICANN decided to create a.biz of its own even though there was one already running.
I'm an American, and I love the US, but the imbalance of the internet towards the US has always bothered me. To me, it always has seemed that it should be a completely global venture, and be supported fairly evenly throughout the globe.
DNS servers are probably a good indicator of internet usage/participation and the fact that other countries are catching up is a good thing; however, just shy of half of the DNS servers are still in the US. That's pretty sad considering we represent less than 5% of the global population. Here's to hoping other countries continue to grow in their participation.
Also, I hope Babelfish improves as globalizations continues.....
I've also found it sad that while the internet is a global service, many TLDs (namely.gov.edu) are US centric. Some countries right now use a.gov.TLDcc title for their government uses, I don't see why it couldn't have been.TLDcc.gov.
perhaps, just perhaps, other countries don't speak english and gov means absolute nothing. I think that USA has a.us domain, it's just also the default domain. So x.gov is really x.gov.us. Of course you didn't want to mean that USA rules the world. Eh... you don't, no?
Other countries might not speak english, but they still get assigned english TLDs, so x.gov wouldn't be a stretch. For example, why is Japan.jp instead of.nh, when germany got.dk?
For example, why is Japan.jp instead of.nh, when germany got.dk?
Last time I checked, Germany is.de..dk is Denmark. As for why some ccTLDs are derived from the local language (.de,.es) and some aren't (.jp,.ru), your guess is as good as mine. (One theory is that countries where the local language uses a non-Roman alphabet (or no alphabet at all) got their ccTLDs derived from the English names for those countries.)
Dude no offense but that sig is pathetical. What would be barbarism, what is civilization and what the force? Being forceful you can turn civilization into barbarism, even without others help.
No, that's not how it works at all..gov [nic.gov] is a top-level domain. ".gov.us" doesn't exist.
Default domains have nothing to do with it: whatever country you're in, a hostname ending with ".gov" refers to the US government's root domain.
For example, if you're in the UK and you fancy visiting a US government site, you'd type, say, "www.whitehouse.gov", not "www.whitehouse.gov.us", because that hostname doesn't exist. Conversely, if you wanted to visit a UK government site, you'd type, say, "www.number-10.gov.
" imbalance of the internet towards the US has always bothered me"
Don't worry the rest of the world will catch up. Just like telephone networks, automobiles and transistors the internet will follow the usual pattern of:
1. US Invents it 2. US then screws it up 3. Other countries improve on methods and make superior products 4. US consumers flock to the improved, cheaper products 5. US companies create something new to get people to 'Buy American' 6. Follow 2 - 6
I'm guessing that the reason we Americans go from a technological breakthrough to wondering why the hell everyone buys the product from overseas is we're either to arrogant and set in our ways, we spent a lot of $$$$ being early adopters and now the technology we use is antiquated just as the rest of the world adopts it, or a combo of the two.
1. US Invents it 2. US then screws it up 3. Other countries improve on methods and make superior products 4. US consumers flock to the improved, cheaper products 5. US companies create something new to get people to 'Buy American' 6. Follow 2 - 6
In alot of cases it more like:
1. Someone invents it. 2. The US makes an implementation of it. 3. The US takes claim to the invention. 4. Other countries continue to improve it. 5. The product goes into it's next cycle in the US because the rest of the world forced them
It kind of reminds me of how the Annual Hockey game is always North America vs. the World (even though the world has some good hockey players).
That's wonderful also and I think that the Internet and everything should also be more globalized, but the DNS servers are providing a resource that has a certain demand associated. Simply, the internet should be skewed to America because, for whatever reason (they are obvious), America likely generates the most requests and receives the most requests (though I do
I am an American, and I like the USA, but the imbalance of the InterNet into the USA always worried itself me. At me it has to always seem that it would have to be a completely global enterprise, and, i.e. continuously rather even with the whole sphere. Dns host are probable a good indicator of the InterNet customs/participation, and the fact that other countries are highly sticking on, is a good thing; however, just shy of half the dns host always are in the USA. Rather more sadly us represent less than 5%
It's still isn't in parity, but I would think that we would probably host DNS servers in propotion relative economies or relative numbers of accessors. I think in both cases the US accounts for about 1/3 of global totals. I would assume that it will stay in parity with those figures for a reasonable period of time. Remember that the internet has only been a mainstream phonomeon for about a decade, so the fact that we developed it is probably a lot of the imbalance. I don't think that you will see India
Can someone please explain how it is that "Name Service" has become synonymous with "The Internet?" Am I mistaken that all these root servers do is propagate name service information down to other machines until my office DNS can tell met that yahoo.com has address 66.218.71.198?
The routers themselves deal in numerical IP space, right? Why is name service so dang important?
I can barely remember my social security number, let alone a IPv6 IP address! I understand that you don' t have to remember all of it, but once real web sites start using IPv6, there will be some long addresses. Of course, people memorize pi to a gazillion decimal places, too.
"The Internet" would function just fine for extended periods of time if name services were more distributed and locally defined. "Root Server" != "The Internet"
The U.S. Interstate Highway System is an engineering marvel and a national asset. Its value lies in its connectivity and capacity, not so much in the green signs with white letters. Most people on it know where they are going already.
Besides, a lot of smaller sites won't even work with the IP address, since they're being vhosted, they depend on you using the actual hostname, which is passed by the browser.
Am I mistaken that all these root servers do is propagate name service information down to other machines until my office DNS can tell met that yahoo.com has address 66.218.71.198?
Correct. But that only happens when everything is working correctly.
Why is name service so dang important?
Try the book "DNS and Bind" (O'Reilly Publishing), pp 1-601.
Maybe I wasn't perfectly clear about what I was asking, but I'm sure the O'Reilly book has the answers. Anyway, what I meant, is that my local DNS and my/etc/hosts or NetInfo database will hold the addresses for virtually everywhere I want to go for months on end. Those numbers don't change, and I can't believe that a call is made to a root server every time someone in the world resolves any name to an IP number. How often do calls to the "root server" get made? Is it only when someone emails me something
Those numbers don't change,... They can, and often do.
How often do calls to the "root server" get made
Many millions of times an hour. Each zone (or domain, in practical terms) has expiration and refresh times. In addition to caching host and other data, these expiration (ttl) and refresh times get cached as well. The clock is ticking on the ttl when first cached, and when it expires a new lookup will have to be made (even if the resulting information is, as you said, identical, e.g. it "doesn't change") Just about every time a lookup is made by a tier 3 name server the query will recursively end up at a root server which will point it back down to a gTLD server and down to the tld auth server which finally sends the data to the requestor.
Or something like that:) The root servers have to operate in a highly reliable way, as almost all name servers use them.. There is hardly a service on the 'net that does NOT rely on names (mail, nntp, shoutcast streaming, rss, http, etc), but you are right in that strictly speaking, routing operations are IP address based and have little to do with DNS.
DNS converts the name (e.g. www.studentprogress.info) into an IP addy (65.49.199.172).
Without DNS, the internet would be like the phone with no phone book.... no way to find the number of the person/company you want to call... and in internet terms, no way to find the IP address of the website you want.
Think about it.... would you (and many users who are new to computers/the internet) find it easier to remember www.studentprogress.info or 65.49.199.172?
My guess would be the hostnames.
The thing is.... surfing by IP only (without DNS) would require EVERY SITE to have a static IP address, instead of every server.
Many hosting companies, etc. use shared servers. I do as well, in fact, for my websites. For example, my website www.studentprogress.info [studentprogress.info] may have the IP address 65.49.199.172, but the site will only show up if you use the hostname.
Based on the sheer number of websites these days, I'm sure we'd run out of IPv4 space instantly without DNS, and maybe even run out of IPv6 space!
ipv4, sure. but ipv6, not any time soon. all joking aside, which i am sure you are, ipv6 gives more addresses than there are particles in the universe, if i remember my geek trivia correctly... no one we run out of those anytime soon.
What happens if all the root DNS servers went off? Would the 2nd-tier boxed be able to take over the role, would they eventually clear their tables, or do they only edit what they have, never perge?
If all the root servers somehow miraculously disappeared then most people would be alright for 1-2 days. After 2 days all the cached NS records for.com will have expired and virtually no one will be able to resolve any.com addresses. Similar results for all other TLDs, but the time until resolution failure for each TLD can differ.
Of course this is a highly unlikely scenerio as there are 13 root DNS servers and many of these servers are actually multiple machines using anycast (for example). Of course, taking out a handful of the machines places sufficient load on the remaining servers to cause them to start dropping requests, but this too is unlikely.
'cause some of us young whippersnappers like to actually *use* this new-fangled Internet-thingy, rather than just putz around with it like you old geezers. Jeez...old farts still think that we should all use hosts files or something.
cause i can't always remember if yahoo is 66.218.71.198 or 66.218.71.189. Hell, i barely know my own phone number and you expect me to remember ip addresses?
DNS is to the internet what the phone book is to the telephone system, with an added advantage that the dns system resides on computers, and computers ar just perfect for making queries. Imagine you'd have to buy a book and look up an ip addresses manually.. wouldn't that be great?
It's easier that it seem using a mnemonic rule: four integers between 0 and 255 and a dot between each of them. Works like a charm. The same method even could be extended to IPv6. Now if you want to memorize the association of address to names it's a little more difficult...
Personally, I'm waiting to see how the contenders in the Presidential election plan to restore American supremacy in this critical area of the New Economy. Forget mere investment in additional servers, let's jump right to forced annexation of the some of these upstart two-bit "nations"...
I'd hate to think any of my packets being exported to those guys who wouldn't even help us rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction! I think in protest, we should hereby refer to all the USA DNS root servers as "Freedom Hosts" (cue Lee Greenwood music...now).
I think you're confused. The Germans volunteered to change the names of things such as saurekraut (I'm only half German) to "Liberty Cabbage" during WWII because they were getting persecuted so much by (you guessed it) Americans. We Americans know that the French are too stuck up to stick it to themselves so we changed "their" things to names like "Freedom Toast." And I'm not old. I learned that "Liberty Cabbage" thing from Grandpa Simpson. I kid you not. Simpson's is edumacational.
And besides, even the govenment couldn't change the name to "Freedom Hosts" because even they are slaves to VeriSign. It'd be all wrapped up in too much irony. Even for this administration.
This whole root server thing is good for the Internet. For way too long, big corporations and the USA government have believed that the US "owns" the Internet. It seems like rules are made based on what USA corporations "want" or "need". Americans *do not* own the internet.
The recent flurry of articles giving the impression that VeriSign is somehow "in charge" of DNS has been rather irritating, when in fact, it is not difficult to configure your DNS server to ignore VeriSign operated root servers. (If you're using bind, dont include thier roots in your roots.cache zone file. I'm sure there's an equivalent trick for djbdns.)
I wish all of those who are about to continue the current flood of "what difference does it make?" and "VeriSign controls DNS anyway." posts would kindly read this article [cr.yp.to] and this one [cr.yp.to] as well for a breif tutorial on DNS from that programmer who writes good shit but everyone says they hate him anyway, D. J. Bernstein [cr.yp.to].
If you like the subject, maybe you should go out and buy a copy of DNS and BIND [oreilly.com] so you'll have something interesting to talk about at the coffee house this weekend.
The truth is that DNS is a distributed system that is rather well designed to be redundant. The anycast implementation mentioned in the article is a good and needed way (it's the right way[tm]) to increase the redundancy that is already inherent in the system, making DNS much more secure and resistant to DDOS attacks and other attempts to disrupt DNS service. VeriSign showing off thier "secure" sites, and blowing thier own horn about how "important" they in particular are to the internet is a load of sh*t that should not be given a second thought unless you are in the habit of educating our lawmakers about related issues. Not an especially good habit, it will make you enemies (but only if you're right).
Personally, I'm torn between the cushy redundancy offered by decentralization, and the cushy security of having most of the servers in a stable, well-protected country. You mean a country like Canada, that doesn't go around pissing off the rest of the world? Diversity is a survival factor, especially in adverse conditions. If we put all the servers in one place, we might as well run the same exact Windows OS on all of them too...
"Personally, I'm torn between the cushy redundancy offered by decentralization, and the cushy security of having most of the servers in a stable, well-protected country."
oh i forgot, germany is such an unstable rogue state. better hurry up and invade!^H^H^H^H^H^H liberate
I'm torn between the cushy redundancy offered by decentralization, and the cushy security of having most of the servers in a stable, well-protected country.
Fuirst of all, Germany is what most knowlegable people would call a "stable, well protected country".
Second, that in and of itself does not affect the security or reliability of DNS as it is designed very much, and has even less signifigance now that anycast is proven to be a reliable technique for increasing redundancy.
The biggest dispute about DNS security (and internet security in general) is between those who prefer centralized, single point solutions, and those who prefer distributed, autonomous security measures. IMHO, centralized security creates weakness in most (all?) cases by creating a single point of failure, and is an approach that is most often motivated by the desire to exert control over internet usage in hopes of personal gain (re: VeriSign), and to establish an authority because of a misguided belief that there need be one.
The internet's basic strength is due to it's lack of dependance on centralized authorities in order to work. Any proposals that change that basic assumption are either poorly thought out or suspect.
Sort of. The root servers don't support recursive DNS queries, but any DNS client/library worth its salt will be able to cope with iterative DNS lookups. You may notice performance problems though: without an intermediate DNS server handling recursive queries there's no DNS caching.
DNS isnt that simple. All the root NS handle is (most importantly) the authority records, such as the authoritative nameserver for slashdot.org, in order to get the needed info you will need to ask the authorotative server. Typically this is handled by your upstream provider. (ISP)
But to answer your question you could probably use a different namesever in china et all unless they are capturing outbound traffic (port 53 in specific).
I dont know how to do this in windows (since i dont use windows) but
You can probably find about a half a million DNS servers that you can query from, or more. That still won't let you connect to web sites that are in blocked IP ranges.
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory keeps all its data in an old gray trunk.
Er (Score:5, Funny)
*dodges the thrown fruit*
Insensitive parent comment! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Insensitive parent comment! (Score:4, Funny)
Well Jeez. Don't go getting all sauer over it.
KFG
This just in (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This just in (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This just in (Score:5, Funny)
You have just proven that at least one person in Australia is a moron, not a terrorist.
Congratulations.
Re:This just in (Score:2)
As opposed to the guy in Nashville who we had believe that we all have kangaroos as pets, only have paved roads in Sydney and Melbourne, that we watch out all the time for crocs and killer koalas and go walkabouts for 3 months once every year. Even worse was when I was asked how long it took to drive to America.
Sad to say that a certain proportion (hopefully smaller than I think) of Americans know that the rest of the world exists bu
Re:This just in (Score:5, Funny)
How could we forget the Maple Leaf state.
How could you forget? I think I know how... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This just in (Score:2)
Re:This just in (Score:2)
Knee-jerk for Slashdot? More like standard joke for Leno, Letterman, Conan, Jon Stewart... heh.
Or me. =) [jinwicked.com]
Re:This just in (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean before western introduced crusades and petrol. More recently I'm not well informed.
Re:This just in (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This just in (Score:2, Insightful)
You are sort of simple minded aren't you. Just because you refuse to acknowledge their existence doesn't mean that they do not exist. You should visit "Euorotrash states" like Belgium, or France. They are really quite nice. Why don't you like Asia? What did Asia ever do to you? (and don't start in on the Bird Flue or SARS). Try not going to an 'amricanized' resort. You'll find that there are other, more interesting cultures, t
Re:This just in (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This just in (Score:3, Insightful)
And just to be fair neither do the puppet governments that the US didn't put in place regardless of how far along they are.
Eventually it's almost all going to be the same thing. Then the only question will be "Do you want fries with that Big Mac?"
Re:This just in (Score:2, Funny)
I thought that was what arts graduates say to computer science graduates...
Re:This just in (Score:2)
You haven't been wearing your tinfoil hat lately, eh?
Obviously, the Chinese government controls world politics.....
Re:This just in (Score:4, Funny)
Re:This just in (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This just in (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently they call it "MSN" everywhere else...
Re:This just in (Score:2)
I would have moderated parent Insightful, but unfortunately it was already on the limit. The US is not all the world, in fact it is not even one third of the world. My first thought when I read the head line was: "That was about time". We don't want too much control over the internt to lie in the hands of one country, no matter which country it is. I know the way DNS is designed it is still possible to mess up the s
Damnit! (Score:5, Funny)
I just changed bloody hosts three days ago and my DNS still isn't completely changed over! Now I find out it's because all the new servers are farting around in Frankfurt! Great, just great! =)~
Re:OMG OMG OMG! (Score:2)
On a side note, it is interesting how the artist draws characters that look like herself. I haven't seen this before. Interesting...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Does it really matter though? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does it really matter though? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does it really matter though? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Does it really matter though? (Score:3, Informative)
No. You don't care. Here's why. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the bad old days you and you alone were in control of name resolution. For those of you without receding and/or grey hairlines who may not know or remember this, you had a file called hosts.txt that contained all the mappings of names to IPs. That, obviously, didn't scale and DNS was developed and was widely deployed by about 86 or so.
The one big gotcha with DNS is it takes control out of your hands. That is, you may have your own DNS server locally, but you traditionally refer to other servers that serve up the root zone that tells your DNS server where all the TLD servers are. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to use other machines, not your own, for this.
This is wrong for many reasons:
But there are ways around this. The easiest if is you static route the 13 root server IPs to your own nameserver. Then you can run an unmodified copt of the legacy root zone [internic.net] on your own nameserver and the US government root servers can be backhoed or DDOS'd and you wouldn't even notice. ISP's are starting to figure this out, especiallly ones with expensive longhaul connections.
Or, you can modify your nameserver to declare youtself primary for the root zone (which you've dutifully downloaded) and edit out the declarations for "." in the legacy root zone.
Or you can use the ORSC root zone [vrx.net]. If it's good enough for two ICANN board members, it's good enough for you.
Whatever you do, for God's sake dump bind [vrx.net] and use DJBDNS [cr.yp.to]. It really is so much better it's just not funny.
Re:No. You don't care. Here's why. (Score:2)
How to do better than that (Score:2)
Probably you mean most people just use their ISP's DNS servers. This is usualy not a terrific idea as most of these blow dead goats.
If you have a spare 386 or higher, deploy it as a dedicated DNS server (under Windows or *nix, it does't matter), primary the root on it and watch everything you do get just a
A testimonial (Score:4, Informative)
Minor /. prediction: (Score:5, Funny)
Time until someone makes a Windows-Linux parallel: 5... 4...
The US... (Score:3, Insightful)
Globalization at its finest (Score:5, Interesting)
DNS servers are probably a good indicator of internet usage/participation and the fact that other countries are catching up is a good thing; however, just shy of half of the DNS servers are still in the US. That's pretty sad considering we represent less than 5% of the global population. Here's to hoping other countries continue to grow in their participation.
Also, I hope Babelfish improves as globalizations continues.....
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that USA has a
Of course you didn't want to mean that USA rules the world. Eh... you don't, no?
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:4, Informative)
Last time I checked, Germany is .de. .dk is Denmark. As for why some ccTLDs are derived from the local language (.de, .es) and some aren't (.jp, .ru), your guess is as good as mine. (One theory is that countries where the local language uses a non-Roman alphabet (or no alphabet at all) got their ccTLDs derived from the English names for those countries.)
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:2)
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:2)
Well, it kinda does.
Our "friends" get to ignore UN resolutions, while our "enemies" get killed faster than a baby at planned parenthood.
The Internet is now a truly global communications medium, but its humble beginnings were for the communication of the US military.
LK
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:2)
No, that's not how it works at all. .gov [nic.gov] is a top-level domain. ".gov.us" doesn't exist.
Default domains have nothing to do with it: whatever country you're in, a hostname ending with ".gov" refers to the US government's root domain.
For example, if you're in the UK and you fancy visiting a US government site, you'd type, say, "www.whitehouse.gov", not "www.whitehouse.gov.us", because that hostname doesn't exist. Conversely, if you wanted to visit a UK government site, you'd type, say, "www.number-10.gov.
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry the rest of the world will catch up. Just like telephone networks, automobiles and transistors the internet will follow the usual pattern of:
1. US Invents it
2. US then screws it up
3. Other countries improve on methods and make superior products
4. US consumers flock to the improved, cheaper products
5. US companies create something new to get people to 'Buy American'
6. Follow 2 - 6
I'm guessing that the reason we Americans go from a technological breakthrough to wondering why the hell everyone buys the product from overseas is we're either to arrogant and set in our ways, we spent a lot of $$$$ being early adopters and now the technology we use is antiquated just as the rest of the world adopts it, or a combo of the two.
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:4, Informative)
Except the US did not invent the autombile [about.com].
The most significant contribution the US has made to automobile engineering is the cup holder.
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:4, Insightful)
So what?
He said invent, not popularise.
I am well aware that the U.S. is good at industrialising other counties inventions.
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:3, Informative)
1. US Invents it
2. US then screws it up
3. Other countries improve on methods and make superior products
4. US consumers flock to the improved, cheaper products
5. US companies create something new to get people to 'Buy American'
6. Follow 2 - 6
In alot of cases it more like:
1. Someone invents it.
2. The US makes an implementation of it.
3. The US takes claim to the invention.
4. Other countries continue to improve it.
5. The product goes into it's next cycle in the US because the rest of the world forced them
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:2)
It mostly is, isn't it?
and be supported fairly evenly throughout the globe.
Well it more or less is. It's supported in accordance with the infrastructure of countries and how much wealth the people have. Like anything else.
That's pretty sad considering we represent less than 5% of the global population.
Only in terms of numbers. It's way more than that in terms of developing and using technology. So it stands to reason where mo
Economics at its finest (Score:2, Interesting)
That's wonderful also and I think that the Internet and everything should also be more globalized, but the DNS servers are providing a resource that has a certain demand associated. Simply, the internet should be skewed to America because, for whatever reason (they are obvious), America likely generates the most requests and receives the most requests (though I do
Babelfish (English French German English) (Score:2)
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Globalization at its finest (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, but what percentage of the INTERNET population does the US represent ?
Can someone please explain (Score:4, Interesting)
The routers themselves deal in numerical IP space, right? Why is name service so dang important?
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:3, Insightful)
Even more so when IPv6 comes in. Besides, unless you're a masochist, I bet your mail client has SMTP: mail..com, rather than it's IP?
Did you come to slashdot.org, or 66.35.250.150?
Thought so.
David
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
PI = 3.14159265666945943945943
See?
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:3, Interesting)
The U.S. Interstate Highway System is an engineering marvel and a national asset. Its value lies in its connectivity and capacity, not so much in the green signs with white letters. Most people on it know where they are going already.
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:3, Informative)
Correct. But that only happens when everything is working correctly.
Why is name service so dang important?
Try the book "DNS and Bind" (O'Reilly Publishing), pp 1-601.
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
Without the root servers you never get the resolution in the first place.
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:5, Informative)
Those numbers don't change,
They can, and often do.
How often do calls to the "root server" get made
Many millions of times an hour. Each zone (or domain, in practical terms) has expiration and refresh times. In addition to caching host and other data, these expiration (ttl) and refresh times get cached as well. The clock is ticking on the ttl when first cached, and when it expires a new lookup will have to be made (even if the resulting information is, as you said, identical, e.g. it "doesn't change") Just about every time a lookup is made by a tier 3 name server the query will recursively end up at a root server which will point it back down to a gTLD server and down to the tld auth server which finally sends the data to the requestor.
Or something like that
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:3, Interesting)
VirtualHosting (Score:3, Informative)
Many hosting companies, etc. use shared servers. I do as well, in fact, for my websites. For example, my website www.studentprogress.info [studentprogress.info] may have the IP address 65.49.199.172, but the site will only show up if you use the hostname.
Based on the sheer number of websites these days, I'm sure we'd run out of IPv4 space instantly without DNS, and maybe even run out of IPv6 space!
Re:VirtualHosting (Score:2)
Of course you can (Score:2)
If you have the disk space, ram and cpu you can do all of these.
You can primary the root zone (it's a piddly 100K file) on a 386 and get better performance than using the legacy root servers.
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:4, Informative)
Of course this is a highly unlikely scenerio as there are 13 root DNS servers and many of these servers are actually multiple machines using anycast (for example). Of course, taking out a handful of the machines places sufficient load on the remaining servers to cause them to start dropping requests, but this too is unlikely.
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
four integers between 0 and 255 and a dot between each of them. Works like a charm. The same method even could be extended to IPv6.
Now if you want to memorize the association of address to names it's a little more difficult...
Sucks (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:wow. (Score:2)
World = 6 billion(ish)
World - America = 6 billion(ish)
At least it's election season... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:At least it's election season... (Score:2)
Canada? or England?
Slashdotted! (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone ping k.root-servers.net [root-servers.net] and try and
Those damn Germans! (Score:5, Funny)
Germans? (Score:5, Informative)
And besides, even the govenment couldn't change the name to "Freedom Hosts" because even they are slaves to VeriSign. It'd be all wrapped up in too much irony. Even for this administration.
Source [fff.org]
Ben
Re:Germans? (Score:2)
Thereby proving that Political Correctness is not a new invention...
The irony is so thick one could walk on it.
SB
But Export Laws will make it alright. (Score:4, Funny)
Its amazing how those forigners keep sneaking back into the US to develop their software then releasing it like it came from other countries!
ls
Explain something to me. (Score:2)
You don't (Score:2)
We're losing the DNS arms race!! (Score:4, Funny)
The US *does not* own the Internet. (Score:3, Insightful)
All your base ... (Score:3, Funny)
It's nice to see an article by someone who knows (Score:5, Informative)
The recent flurry of articles giving the impression that VeriSign is somehow "in charge" of DNS has been rather irritating, when in fact, it is not difficult to configure your DNS server to ignore VeriSign operated root servers. (If you're using bind, dont include thier roots in your roots.cache zone file. I'm sure there's an equivalent trick for djbdns.)
I wish all of those who are about to continue the current flood of "what difference does it make?" and "VeriSign controls DNS anyway." posts would kindly read this article [cr.yp.to] and this one [cr.yp.to] as well for a breif tutorial on DNS from that programmer who writes good shit but everyone says they hate him anyway, D. J. Bernstein [cr.yp.to].
If you like the subject, maybe you should go out and buy a copy of DNS and BIND [oreilly.com] so you'll have something interesting to talk about at the coffee house this weekend.
The truth is that DNS is a distributed system that is rather well designed to be redundant. The anycast implementation mentioned in the article is a good and needed way (it's the right way[tm]) to increase the redundancy that is already inherent in the system, making DNS much more secure and resistant to DDOS attacks and other attempts to disrupt DNS service. VeriSign showing off thier "secure" sites, and blowing thier own horn about how "important" they in particular are to the internet is a load of sh*t that should not be given a second thought unless you are in the habit of educating our lawmakers about related issues. Not an especially good habit, it will make you enemies (but only if you're right).
There's one "Long Bet" candidate taken care of (Score:2)
There is a web site called Long Bets [longbets.com] where people can place long term bets that may not be settled until long after they are dead.
For example, the longest bet is Long Bet #7 - The universe will eventually stop expanding [longbets.org]. I don't suppose any of us will be around to empirically determine the answer.
One candidate for a bet is/was Long Bet #26 - By the end of 2012, more than 50% of the root servers on the internet will be located outside the United States [longbets.org].
But noone accepted the bet.
Re:Dilemma (Score:3, Troll)
Re:Dilemma (Score:4, Funny)
oh i forgot, germany is such an unstable rogue state. better hurry up and invade!^H^H^H^H^H^H liberate
Re:Dilemma (Score:4, Interesting)
Fuirst of all, Germany is what most knowlegable people would call a "stable, well protected country".
Second, that in and of itself does not affect the security or reliability of DNS as it is designed very much, and has even less signifigance now that anycast is proven to be a reliable technique for increasing redundancy.
D. J. Bernstein [cr.yp.to] has provided some good [cr.yp.to] introductory [cr.yp.to] about the workings of DNS, including security [cr.yp.to].
There's a chapter on DNS security [oreilly.com] from "DNS and BIND" available at the [oreilly.com] O'reilly [oreilly.com] website as well.
The biggest dispute about DNS security (and internet security in general) is between those who prefer centralized, single point solutions, and those who prefer distributed, autonomous security measures. IMHO, centralized security creates weakness in most (all?) cases by creating a single point of failure, and is an approach that is most often motivated by the desire to exert control over internet usage in hopes of personal gain (re: VeriSign), and to establish an authority because of a misguided belief that there need be one.
The internet's basic strength is due to it's lack of dependance on centralized authorities in order to work. Any proposals that change that basic assumption are either poorly thought out or suspect.
Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Not really a subject I understand, so let me as (Score:2)
Re:Not really a subject I understand, so let me as (Score:3, Informative)
But to answer your question you could probably use a different namesever in china et all unless they are capturing outbound traffic (port 53 in specific).
I dont know how to do this in windows (since i dont use windows) but
Re:Not really a subject I understand, so let me as (Score:2)