[LINK] alternative DNS root clients

[Kim Holburn]

Why shouldn't we as DNS clients be able to use more than one DNS root?  

DNS clients don't seem to handle more than one DNS server very well.  They never have.  Part of the problem is that when your client fires off a DNS request, because of the distributed nature of DNS, the (first) server in your server list might well take some time to get back to your client.  It can take a while for your first server to decide that the DNS name does not exist because it may have to talk to several other DNS servers to find this out.  A while, meaning 10 seconds or more.  Your client may then decide to use the second DNS server but ten seconds or more is a lot in user interface time, twenty is really bad.  I'm not even sure why we configure more than one DNS server in a client because if the first one dies the user's experience is usually that DNS is down.  

If I want to add another DNS root to my client, say for example opennic.org, and I put a normal DNS server as my first server and an opennic.org DNS server as my second DNS server (or v.v.) it can take a long time to get to the second server.  

Opennic's servers serve normal ICANN TLDs as well as opennic TLDs, but why shouldn't this happen at the client level?  Why can't you specify several root domains?

Is there something I've missed here?

http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/14/reclaim-the-internet-in-under-a-minute/
http://www.opennicproject.org/

-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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