Taking lead on ORSN project April 13
I write this, to clear things out and show what my future plans are.
I’ve followed the progress of Open Root Server Network since 2002. While supporting it by using their service since then i switched on operating the node B in September 2006. This node is sponsored by FunkFeuer in Vienna as a successor of ATnet which closed it’s service for that node after it was sold to EUnet.
Currently, in my opinion - ORSN is a proof of concept. This means that we’ve shown that it’s possible to run an independent root server network which sticks to the zone principles of ICANN. But it has still to be considered experimental and needs some further steps to get interesting for the big ISPs too. While talking to operators of UPC, SilverServer and some others the main issue they are concerning about is the stability. They don’t think we’re poisoning the zone but somehow hessitate to switch before other big players did so. So we’re currently having an hen and egg situation. Questioned how to break this most of them came up with the idea of a legal entity focused on the development of the future network. The outcome of this should be some kind of mission statements which show exactly where we are and where we want to go.
As Markus Grundmann is currently very low on his spare time i’ve choosen to take the lead of the project for a while and will try to get following challenges a bit futher.
- Legal entity
We’re currently thinking about an appropriate aproach for this. There needs to be considered that we don’t want to fall in the same position ICANN currently is (controlled by one government). Also we don’t want to be based in one country nor in one continent. But question here also is, what will keep our organisational costs minimal. - DNSSEC
Although there is at least one open issue (”Zone walking”) on DNSSEC itself, it’s probably good to do the first step into a more secure DNS.
Personally i don’t consider zone walking as a blocking issue for the introduction of DNSSEC because i stick with the “DNS is public”-argument. I am more concerned about the performance issues this might cause. - Anycast
Currently the load on our servers is not that high as we would need Anycast structure, but if we head forward in providing service to big ISPs the stability will be a big issue - as said. Considering the importance of our service we will get a more interesting target for attackers too.
I hope this gives people interested some insight on my planned steps for the further development of ORSN.