[dns-operations] FreeBSD and the slaving of the root zone

[Michael Sinatra]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> Pierre Beyssac noticed that FreeBSD default configuration is now to
> slave the root zone from the root name servers who accept it:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/etc/namedb/named.conf

According to the link, Doug Barton made the changes on June 18 to start 
slaving the root zone.  I think he's on this list, so he could probably 
comment more on his decision.

I know this argument has happened before in other venues, so I am 
hesitant to join in, but it occurs to me that if we believe that there 
is a significant amount of garbage traffic (for local zones, RFC1918 
resolution, or just bizarre crap), then slaving . might actually benefit 
the root nameservers.  OTOH, if your nameserver is only sending legit 
queries to the roots, then you're probably not helping that much by slaving.

Moreover, I run a caching NS on my home FreeBSD workstation, which 
averages very few queries per hour over the course of a day, and I have 
a hard time understanding how it or the root NSes would benefit from 
having it slave root.

michael