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From: medin@cincsac.arc.nasa.gov (Milo S. Medin)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains
Subject: Re: problems with nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Message-ID: <1991Mar4.032736.9761@riacs.edu>
Date: 4 Mar 91 03:27:36 GMT
References: <1991Feb22.181958.14608@ns.uoregon.edu> <75539@bu.edu.bu.edu> <1991Feb26.092928.954@ecrc.de> <1991Mar3.070813.29410@riacs.edu> <1991Mar3.234002.3035@waikato.ac.nz>
Sender: news@riacs.edu
Reply-To: medin@cincsac.arc.nasa.gov (Milo S. Medin)
Organization: NASA Science Internet Project Office
Lines: 27

In article <1991Mar3.234002.3035@waikato.ac.nz>, john@waikato.ac.nz (John Houlker) writes:
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|> 
|> Milo, given the inertia of the large number of "broken" servers, what
|> about a "hack" of applying filters (at international gateways) on domain
|> UDP to root servers that are too "distant".  That would improve the
|> RTT estimation :-).  Is root-root server traffic all TCP?
|> 
|> John

John, this is a gross hack.  And it just means that the transatlantic link
might not get the requests, but all the packets would still get to the
U.S. side of the router.  Not to mention that some people might need to
talk to the root legitimately for debugging, and this all assumes that 
the root server in Europe isn't primary for anything else.  All the root-root
is normally TCP if they are zone xferring, but many roots in the U.S. do
act as primaries for other things.  

And none of this fixes the problem of European transit traffic via the U.S.
The point of my post was simply to indicate that the problem is complicated,
and people are working on it, but that progress is slow...  But not as slow
as getting a really well working BIND implementation!

							Thanks,
							   Milo