[afnog] Decreasing Access Time to Root Servers DNS by Running One on Loopback

[Nishal Goburdhan]

On 27 Nov 2015, at 9:28, Mark Tinka wrote:

> Needless to say, there is reasonable peering of root name servers
> globally, including within Africa.

yes, but the situation can always be made better.  for example, over the 
past 18-odd months, there’s been almost a node a month, installed in 
this region.  but there’s still large parts of africa that’s not 
cross-border peered, or don’t have a local DNS root instance, and 
still those, who may be reliant on satellite, and fetching this data 
from the north.  a more distributed root would benefit them.


> I suppose the question is - what is "longer-than-desired round-trip 
> times"?

here’s an unscientific set of results, from the name-server at my home 
in jnb below.  only 10 of these, are what i’d call desirable.

nishal at admin:~ % dig +nssearch . | awk -F ' ' '{print $10, $11, $13}'
server 192.5.5.241 13
server 199.7.83.42 13
server 199.7.91.13 14
server 192.36.148.17 15
server 192.203.230.10 15
server 192.58.128.30 15
server 2001:500:3::42 18
server 2001:7fe::53 19
server 2001:500:2f::f 20
server 2001:500:2d::d 33
server 193.0.14.129 181
server 198.41.0.4 189
server 2001:503:c27::2:30 193
server 192.33.4.12 195
server 2001:503:ba3e::2:30 194
server 2001:500:2::c 199
server 2001:dc3::35 203
server 2001:7fd::1 203
server 192.112.36.4 207
server 202.12.27.33 216
server 128.63.2.53 272
server 2001:500:1::803f:235 291
server 2001:500:84::b 328
server 192.228.79.201 346

—n.