The Revolution Arrives from Spain

It's new because it runs on a far smaller machine than is normal for a root server. They are talking about running a root server on a 1.2Ghz Athlon with 1.5GB of RAM. Up until they dropped the hardware config from their site, ISC's "F" root server used to be run by two AlphaServers, each with 4 500mhz CPUs and 8Gig of RAM (website now says it's up to 4 machines, but doesn't specify what hardware). If you look at the comparison page for the RS-DNS server though, it looks to me like they've simply done away with the BIND text-based zone files and implemented their own (probably) binary zone files. Text is nice for us to look at, but it's slow for a machine to parse and takes up far more room. For example, an IP address string of "192.168.12.32" is 13 bytes long, and for a machine to read, has to be carefully parsed for dots, numbers, and to ensure the numbers are in the correct range. If you didn't mind it not being human-readable, you could easily compress it to 4...less than half the size, 1 byte for each number. It'd also have the bonus of doing away with the parsing and checking, as a byte has a max range of 255.

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Re:Explain by Anonymous

Re:Explain
by Muhhk on Thursday January 09 2003, @12:24AM (#10933)
User #3085 Info

I'm think you're not understanding the "scale" of a root server. This company's root server is simply a box for a single company to do its own root lookups rather than using their ISP's or a "hints" file for the real root servers. Verisigns Alpha's are root serving for the entire world.

I'd question anyway whether what this company has done is significant, my company's primary DNS server is a 486DX2-66 with 20Mb of RAM!

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Explain by askii Friday January 10 2003, @07:24PM
- Re:Explain by Anonymous Sunday January 12 2003, @12:13AM

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