On Sep 5, 2012, at 2:13 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email protected]> wrote:

> But I wonder what would happen if every small network with an OpenWRT
> router and Nagios starts pinging them every minute. Is it a reasonable
> use?

No, absolutely not. The "tragedy of the commons" problems are *way* more 
important than your tech support issues.

> Do the root name servers operators have an opinion about that? Is
> there a better alternative?

Yes: spend $50/year for a hosted web server and use that. You pay for your own 
traffic. There is no way to have this scale to the Internet.

> [You have probably seen this project, which is partially related:
> <https://labs.ripe.net/Members/dfk/ripe-atlas-anchors>. A case where
> many small boxes testing an unwilling service created problems: 
> <http://slashdot.org/story/06/04/07/130209/d-link-firmware-abuses-open-ntp-servers>.]

Another story: I was asked to set up an open STUN server in the early days, so 
I did so. The instructions at the web site very clearly said "use the domain 
name, not the actual IP address". A few years later, my ISP noted that the STUN 
traffic to my server was more than an order of magnitude more than all the 
other traffic combined, so I turned off the STUN server and had the name point 
to a box at Cisco (who had suggested I do the work the first time).

Six months later, the traffic to the IP address of a STUN server that had been 
silent for over six months was still higher than the rest of the web and mail 
for that server. So, not only did developers ignore the "use the domain name" 
request, they weren't even checking the return results.

Do not send crap to the root servers, OK?

--Paul Hoffman
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