Future of DNS, DNSSEC, country code delegations, etc.

[Dr Josef Karthauser]

On 25 Feb 2014, at 08:52, Peter Wemm <peter at wemm.org> wrote:

> We (with clusteradm@ hat on) have been looking at another round of broken
> mirrors, delegated DNS servers that have gone lame/missing, subzones that
> have gone missing. wwwN.freebsd.org / wwwN.cc.freebsd.org that now point to
> Ubuntu or Microsoft IIS pages, stale/missing ftp mirrors etc.
> 
> [cut]
> 
> We (freebsd.org) use ISC's global anycasted ISC-SNS dns servers.  In our
> experience they have excellent coverage around the world so we'd prefer to
> fold the *.cc.freebsd.org zone into the main freebsd.org zone (like
> wwwN.us.freebsd.org and ftpN.us.freebsd.org are right now).  Actual
> sub-zones could be done if there's a regional reachability problem but I
> would rather not unless we absolutely had to.
> 
> [cut]
> 
> Disadvantages:
> * There has been resistance and hurt feelings when ideas like this have
> come up in the past.
> * Loss of independence.
> * There are residual bad memories from when working with dnsadm@ was really
> painful and slow.  (I assure you, this is no longer a problem!)
> 
> [cut]
> 
> Thoughts?  How can we make this work without provoking (too many) ruffled
> feathers?

Hey Peter,

Sorry for taking a while to respond.

This seems like an eminently sensible idea.  Although there's some pride here in owning part of the FreeBSD infrastructure, we were the first source mirror outside of the USA in uk. and have been in service for donkeys years, the simple truth is that mirror support has crumbled and I always find myself reaching for a top level FreeBSD.org server when I want an update. I think that the Internet has changed since those early days of next to no or expensive bandwidth, and the need for local infrastructure has pretty much gone (with perhaps the exception of some remote localities).

I'm in favour of passing uk.freeBSD.org back to central administration - I think that we boil down to just a single FTP mirror these days anyway; cvsup support has already been dropped in the uk.

Cheers,
Joe