[dns-operations] Defining the "be like a root" problem

[Paul Hoffman]

On May 17, 2012, at 12:38 PM, Dave Knight wrote:

> 
> On 2012-05-17, at 2:28 PM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> 
>> Just to put a stake in the ground, is this the problem statement people agree with:
>> 
>> Some ISPs want to act like root servers, so the root server operators should help those ISPs do so.
> 
> There's an important distinction to be made between 'act like a root server' and 'slave the root zone'. Their appropriate course of action in the first case ought to be to contact a root server operator to discuss hosting an anycast instance. It's the second case we're discussing here.

From looking at the thread, I'm not convinced that you are correct. The common definition of being a slave zone is that you are just as authoritative as the primary. To me, that means "act like a root server". Using "slave" as a verb seems to have the meaning "transfer the zone in order to act like a slave", but some people have talked about other ways of updating other than zone transfers.

--Paul Hoffman