[LINK] alternative DNS root clients

[Scott Howard]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 5:52 PM, Kim Holburn <kim at holburn.net> wrote:

> DNS clients don't seem to handle more than one DNS server very well.


Then you should complain to whoever is writing the "clients" (or more
specifically the clients resolver). Certainly in my experience most DNS
'clients' do seem to get it right.

A worthwhile resolver will remember that a specific server is unavailable,
and will be only attempt to re-use it periodically, or not at all -
presuming of course that it's got alternatives.

I've just confirmed that this definitely occurs for me with Windows 7 and
both Firefox and IE.  I configured 2 DNS servers - one that does not
respond, and a second that does.  The very first request I did was slow -
maybe 5+ seconds - before it failed over to the second DNS server and
started working.  However every subsequent request has been fast, and from
watching the network traffic I can see that it is only querying the
second/alive 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?
>

Because the entire concept of alternative root servers is fundamentally
flawed and would fragment the Internet in ways that would do nothing but
cause pain.  Thankfully the people that write DNS clients know this, and
thus have not implemented features that would allow this to happen.

If you really want to drink the OpenNIC cool-aid (or that of any other
alternative-TLD, because there are several - often conflicting - of them
out there) then you can simply point at their root DNS servers, as they
always also serve up domains for the "real" TLD's, so you can still query
.com domains, etc.  Well, until your newly chosen alternate root server
decides that they don't like the existing .COM and wants to come up with
their own...

  Scott