offtopic and very spamish
On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 17:14, Joe Baptista wrote:
> FYI - enjoy.
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29185.html
>
> Dud queries swamp US Internet Root servers
> By Joe Baptista
> Posted: 05/02/2003 at 09:47 GMT
>
> Broken queries are swamping US Internet servers with unnecessary
> traffic. A detailed analysis of 152 million messages received on Oct.
> 4, 2002 by one of the root servers in California showed that only 2
> per cent of the queries were legitimate.
>
> The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at
> the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) which conducted the research
> is trying to understand why the roots get so many broken queries from
> Internet service providers.
>
> DNS root servers provide a critical service to Internet users by
> mapping text host names to numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
> The 13 roots are operated by a mix of volunteers and U.S. government
> agencies. The U.S. Department of Commerce is the agency responsible
> for managing the root system which serves most Internet users.
>
> "If the system were functioning properly, it seems that a single
> source should need to send no more than 1,000 or so queries to a root
> name server in a 24-hour period," said CAIDA researcher Duane Wessels.
> "Yet we see millions of broken queries from certain sources."
>
> CAIDA researchers speculate that 70 per cent of the bad requests are
> due to misconfigured packet filters, firewalls, or other security
> mechanisms intended to restrict network traffic. Twelve per cent of
> the illegitimate traffic however could not be explained and was for
> nonexistent top-level domains, such as ".elvis", ".corp" and
> "localhost".
>
> .elvis is alive and well and living in an Alternative Root Universe
>
> CAIDAs results are no surprise to Bradley Thornton, a root server
> operator at PacificRoot and director of the Top Level Domain
> Association, an organization of domain operators. He operates the
> .corp alternative TLD for the business community.
>
> The "localhost" queries are to be expected, he says. A computer can
> have many names - but all computers use "localhost" on the Internet as
> the host name of the local loopback interface. "The localhost naming
> convention is an Internet standard and the localhost errors represent
> misconfigured DNS settings at the user or ISP level, he says. The rest
> of the "nonexistent" illegitimate traffic is a vote of confidence in
> the "inclusive namespace" (i.e. alternative TLDs) which Thornton
> helped pioneer.
>
> "There may only be one Internet," explains Thornton, "but we now have
> many namespaces and thats confusing the legacy root system." Top-level
> domains in the U.S. roots include country codes such as ".uk" for
> England, ".ca" for Canada, or ".us" for the United States, as well as
> generic domains such as ".com", ".net", and ".edu". There are some 300
> top level domains in the US root but inclusive namespace has over
> 10,000 listed.
>
> Thornton thinks that inclusive namespace user activity is the cause of
> much of the rogue traffic. "Anytime one of our users publishes a URL
> from our namespace or any namespace in email or via the web that link
> becomes available to potentially millions of U.S. root users. When
> those users clicks one of our URLs a query is generated."
>
> This explains the dud traffic discovered by CAIDA, he says. In the
> inclusive namespace universe ".corp" is a busy top level domain and
> Thornton speculates that ".elvis" is alive and well and living in some
> unknown root system heaven.
>
> According to KC Claffy, a resident research scientist at CAIDA,
> traffic originating from the inclusive namespace system is likely part
> of the results. But Wessels, the project leader, emphasized there was
> not much evidence of alternative (inclusive namespace) TLDs in the
> data collected.
>
> Thornton disagrees: "the data clearly shows were having an effect." A
> TLD only needs an average of 10,000 hits in the root to show
> significant activity based on the CAIDA data of 3 million legitimate
> queries for 300 listed TLDs, he argues.
>
> "CAIDA reports that .corp got 51,000 queries and that's very
> significant evidence, he says.
>
> Joe Baptista is involved in the running of dot-god.com, the "official
> domain registry for web addresses ending in .god and .satan".
>
> Joe Baptista - only at www.baptista.god
>
> ----------------------------------> NEWS <-----------------
> //////////B////////// BBC News - Americas
> //////////B/B/C///// http://bbc.news/2/hi/americas
> //////B/B/C//////// BBC News about the Americas, in
> ////////////////// in alternative root format.
--
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