[dns-operations] Vista and DNS traffic

[Roy Arends]

On Sep 6, 2006, at 11:33 PM, Olaf M. Kolkman wrote:

>
> "If you adopt Vista, your DNS traffic is going to double,"
> Mockapetris said in an interview. With many DNS servers already
> running close to capacity, this can have serious consequences, he
> said. "You're going to see brownouts. All of a sudden, it is going to
> be mud season on the Internet, where things will just be kind of slow
> and gooey."
>
>
> http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6112338.html?tag=nl.e550

Dan Kaminsky countering Paul's claims:

"First, while there are indeed a couple underprovisioned name  
servers, there's far more that have lots and lots of slack capacity.  
You need slack capacity to deal with shock load. The networks that  
would fail because of Vista's release, would fail because of a three  
day weekend.

Second, Vista's not getting deployed all at once. This is no service  
pack that's deployed to a hundred million desktops via Windows  
Update! Mockapetris is correct in that there will be a noticable  
increase in DNS traffic, but that increase will be spread out over  
the course of a couple years. Slow increases like this tend not to  
cause the sort of catastrophic failure that Mockapetris refers to.

Finally, and most importantly (in the sense that Mockapetris should  
know better): Most of the work done to service the IPv6 request, is  
cached and available to service the IPv4. To complete a DNS lookup,  
you have to locate a particular server, known as the authoritative  
server for a domain. The same authoritative server that hosts the  
IPv6 (AAAA) record also hosts the IPv4 (A) record. So even if Vista  
sends twice the traffic, the upstream nameserver is certainly not  
experiencing twice the load."

http://www.doxpara.com/?q=node/1136

Roy