Stephen Sprunk wrote: >Thus spake "Einar Stefferud" <Stef@thor.nma.com> > > >>In fact, if you look around the Internet, you will see that every >>Intra-Lan and Extra-Lan has its own private root servers with >>subsets of the total set of available TLDs. >> >> > >Very few corporations (and no ISPs, AFAIK) run their own roots. > Enh...there is a sense in which internal DNS servers may be considered roots. For example, I name the hosts on my home LAN out of "local.thibault.org", which is not visible from the outside. This sort of split DNS is easier than lumping all my names under "thibault.org" and maintaining two separate copies of the zone files. It does mean, though, that, conceptually, my DNS server is like an alternate root server, in that it handles queries for a domain that can't be found if you start at the root. The fact that my server performs recursion, and an alternate root server does not, is a performance decision, not a fundamental difference. (On the other hand, Einar's wrong in saying that *every* LAN has a private root server--for example, some universities don't impose any inside/outside division at all.) -- /===========================================================\ |John Stracke |jstracke@centivinc.com | |Principal Engineer|http://www.centivinc.com | |Centiv |My opinions are my own. | |===========================================================| |We must be devious, cunning, inventive... too bad we're us.| \===========================================================/