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

[Emilio Perea]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 01:32:17PM -0700, Jason Fesler wrote:
> I'm very interested in this idea; both to reduce unwarranted traffic,  
> and to also get a faster NXDOMAIN.  I don't think I'd want to propose  
> a default name server config that did this though.  I have thousands  
> of name servers that really shouldn't individualy slave that zone,  
> for instance; but for me to fetch it from a couple of locations, and  
> in turn feed it to all the resolvers via whatever means (axfr, rsync,  
> multicast, whatever) seems like a win for me personally.  Having the  
> largest DNS-(ab)using organizations slave the root zone, seems like  
> it'd be a win for the root server operators.

Being at the smaller end of the scale, I transfer the root zone (from
f.root-servers.net) once a month and rsync it to a half-dozen other
resolvers.  In the three years I've done this I haven't run into any
problems due to stale data, and there was a noticeable improvement in
response time when this was implemented.

I believe it was a good solution for our small company, but don't know
how well it scales.  The idea of every resolver getting daily root zone
transfers by default just boggles the mind, though...