[dns-operations] The (very) uneven distribution of DNS root servers on the Internet

[Paul Hoffman]

On May 15, 2012, at 11:04 PM, paul vixie wrote:

> On 5/15/2012 11:56 PM, David Conrad wrote:
>> ... In the context of this blog posting, I personally think having
>> folks (ISPs in particular) pre-fetch/mirror the root zone in their
>> caches is the right answer to pretty much any useful definition of
>> "fair and equitable" related to serving the root zone :-).
> 
> now that i've been reminded that the SOA timers are shorter than the
> update frequency and that no NOTIFY is required for up-to-date stealth
> slave service; and now that the root is signed, making it unlikely that
> stealth copies will be amended or that their namespaces will be
> overloaded with other stealth slaves... i agree with drc here. let's
> start encouraging widespread stealth slavery for the root zone.

I'm deeply confused by the threads that followed this proposal. It seems that the problem is "some ISP's recursive resolvers have not great connections to a local root server".

If so, why are the solutions proposed heavy-weight protocols and policy initiatives? Instead, suggest to the ISPs with the problem that they run a simple program every six hours. The program is in essence:
  for ThisTLD in ListOfKnownTLDs:
    dig @yourdnsserver ThisTLD NS
This fills their cache, well within the TTL of any of the TLDs.

Doesn't that solve the problem?

--Paul Hoffman