Acting as stealth slave for root zone

[Bill Larson]

On Dec 8, 2004, at 11:37 AM, David Carmean wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 05:31:18PM +0000, Paul Vixie wrote:
>
>> Certainly F has always allowed zone transfers of the root zone, even 
>> when
>> it was called NS.ISC.ORG back before the letter-names came into 
>> being.  It
>> is ISC's intention to permit AXFR of the root zone from f-root, 
>> always.
>
> What are your thoughts as a root server operator about this as a 
> technique
> to reduce the load on the roots?

Remember that all you are going to see is the delegation for the top 
level domains.

For example, you would see that the ".com" domain is delegated to 
"[a-m].gtld-servers.net".  You would not be obtaining the ".com" zone 
delegations this way, which seems to be the desire to help "reduce the 
load on the roots".

This really wouldn't reduce the load very much because as soon as you 
were to query a root server for any ".com" hostname, the delegated 
servers for the ".com" zone would be returned to you and then cached 
for 172800 seconds, or two days, at which time you would have to 
perform the query again against one of the root servers.  You would be 
cutting down from one query for each TLD every two days by performing a 
zone transfer, which you would need to do periodically anyway.

Which one is "better"?

Bill Larson