[dns-operations] Should medium-sized companies run their own recursive resolver?

[Jared Mauch]

On Oct 17, 2013, at 4:09 AM, Daniel Kalchev <daniel at digsys.bg> wrote:

> 
> On 17.10.13 00:12, Jared Mauch wrote:
>> Even small networks (I have a friend with a ~100 user wisp) shouldn't run their own caches. The economics of it don't support this.
>> 
> 
> Care to elaborate on this economic problem?
> 
> Just an reference point:
> Most of today's smartphones already have more resources than the DNS resolvers many small ISPs already use and those ISPs don't suffer from any kind of trouble because of that.
> And, these smartphones are considered disposable tech.

He's power/space constrained in some locations.  It's also not cheap to get equipment that will run in a shed at the base of a tower that's not climate controlled.  There is some hardware that could be used for this, but the cost of pointing at his upstream or someone else is much lower and reduces any possible OPEX on his side for it.

There's also the need for monitoring, care and feeding, etc..  100 subscribers and not a lot of profit means lack of capital to invest.  easier to just "outsource" to upstream/3rd party.  

Also, customer CPE equipment is poor and doesn't scale well for the current rate of DNS queries needed to load a webpage and the volume of devices now in the home.  Many pages will require 100+ elements or DNS queries to transact the basics.  This means tech support calls for "network is down or intermittent" that require hard-coding to work around the busted CPE gear. (e.g.: use these resolvers instead of those i just got from DHCP).  He's small so ends up making house calls to fix things for those that are unable to do it themselves.

- Jared