The State of F-Root

We’ve had another good year with F-Root, with twelve new sites coming online, and two Classic sites getting upgraded to F-single configuration (see below for an explanation of the difference). Two further sites were decommissioned. We had hoped to upgrade more of the Classic sites, but negotiations with the site sponsors are in progress at most of those.

Our provisioning systems are now pretty mature and we’ve deployed an internal Prometheus data collection system with a Grafana front end to get a better view of our DNS traffic, both for short term spikes and longer term trends.

As of the end of 2022, F-Root consists of:

• 3 global sites (2021: 3)
• 73 “F-single” sites (2021: 58)
• 5 “Classic” sites (2021: 8)
• 259 additional nodes hosted by Cloudflare (2021: 219)

A global site hosts two F-Root servers as well as F-Root management infrastructure, and advertises covering prefixes for our Anycast addresses into the global routing table. An F-single is our current configuration, and relies on a single 1U Dell server to provide both the F-Root DNS service and BGP Anycast routing. A Classic site comprises 2x F-Root servers, a serial console server, routers, and switches. The Classic sites are being gradually phased out and where possible replaced with an F-single node. Both F-single and Classic configurations use the BGP “NO_EXPORT” community to limit their geographical catchment areas.

Site Changes Completed in 2022

New Sites

Upgraded Sites

The full lists of sites run by ISC (as well as the other 11 Root Server Operators) can be seen at https://www.root-servers.org/

• Ray Bellis, Director of DNS Operations