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A Root with a view…

26 November 2007
By
John Crain

John Crain

SVP & Chief Technology Officer

John is responsible for leading ICANN organization (org)’s efforts to improve knowledge about the identifiers ICANN helps coordinate and disseminate this information to the Internet community. He is also responsible for oversight of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions.

A member of the org executive team, John works with staff and the community to enable and enhance capabilities that improve the overall security, stability, and resiliency of the Internet’s identifier systems and associated infrastructures. He also represents ICANN in operational and technical dialogues and forums to ensure the community’s engagement with these programs.

Prior to his time at ICANN org, John worked as part of the executive management team at RIPE NCC in Amsterdam. RIPE NCC is the regional Internet registry (RIR) that provides Internet resource allocations for Europe and surrounding areas. John has been directly involved in the administration of Internet identifiers since his start at RIPE NCC in 1995 and has worked in all areas of Internet Protocol (IP) address administration. John also has extensive experience in Domain Name System (DNS) administration and managing Internet infrastructure services. Before becoming involved in Internet administration, John worked as a design engineer in composite materials research and development. In that role, John was also responsible for local area networking of computer aided design systems and for writing and developing custom software applications.

Running a DNS server that serves the root gives an interesting view into the world of the DNS. With the ongoing improvements to the ICANN operated L-ROOT we've been fortunate enough to be able to make use of the "DNS Statistics Collector" tool.

http://dns.measurement-factory.com/tools/dsc/

"DSC" allows us to generate different views of the DNS queries we have been seeing at the L-ROOT systems. Both to the current IP address (199.7.83.42) and to the old address (198.32.64.12).

The above graph shows the commonly queried Top Level Domains for a single day and the type of queries being asked. These are queries seen across l.root-servers.net. The TLDs change from day to day but some are persistent.No surprises in there really although some of the TLDs being queried should raise a few eyebrows.Seeing mainly addresses record queries (A and AAAA) for .com or .net, or a lot of requests for reverse delegation informations (PTR) in .arpa are logical things to see.However, ".local" is constantly in the top five of queries which is likely an indication of misconfiguration somewhere. Regular appearances are also made by ".localhost", ".belkin", ".home", ".invalid", ".localdomain" and ".domain".I leave it to the reader to decide why this is and at whom to point fingers…

Clearly one thing is certain, a large portion of the queries we are seeing are for non existing domains and hence get answered with "NXDOMAIN" (See above).Oh and one last snippet of information. I know that sometimes people do not allow DNS queries over TCP. This is actually not a good idea. According to the RFCs it is OK to query over TCP and in the case of a large enough answer (over 512 bytes) then TCP is typically the way to get that. So although the number of TCP queries is small compared to those using UDP, they can be valid queries.

Special thanks have to go to the folks who produced DSC . If only for making my life easier.If people want to see more data or would like to hear more about what we are doing in L-ROOT operations then speak up and I will do my best to inform. After all we run this for the community.Also see http://l.root-servers.org for information on L-ROOT operations.

Authors

John Crain

John Crain

SVP & Chief Technology Officer
John Crain

John Crain

SVP & Chief Technology Officer

John is responsible for leading ICANN organization (org)’s efforts to improve knowledge about the identifiers ICANN helps coordinate and disseminate this information to the Internet community. He is also responsible for oversight of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions.

A member of the org executive team, John works with staff and the community to enable and enhance capabilities that improve the overall security, stability, and resiliency of the Internet’s identifier systems and associated infrastructures. He also represents ICANN in operational and technical dialogues and forums to ensure the community’s engagement with these programs.

Prior to his time at ICANN org, John worked as part of the executive management team at RIPE NCC in Amsterdam. RIPE NCC is the regional Internet registry (RIR) that provides Internet resource allocations for Europe and surrounding areas. John has been directly involved in the administration of Internet identifiers since his start at RIPE NCC in 1995 and has worked in all areas of Internet Protocol (IP) address administration. John also has extensive experience in Domain Name System (DNS) administration and managing Internet infrastructure services. Before becoming involved in Internet administration, John worked as a design engineer in composite materials research and development. In that role, John was also responsible for local area networking of computer aided design systems and for writing and developing custom software applications.

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