Adam -- DNS survey
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Introduction
The DNS (Domain Name System) is a distributed, hierarchical database
which provides (among other things) the mapping between names and IP
addresses for machine on the internet. It is a complicated and subtle
system, and essential to the correct operation of almost every internet
service. A collection of documents describing the purpose and mechanism
of the DNS (including the well over 100 DNS-related RFCs) is
here.
We are currently gathering data from the DNS, by performing
zone-transfers of as many zones as we can, starting with the gTLD zone
files, and working down the tree of delegations. We hope to use this
data to:
- analyze the content of the DNS (and compare it to the usage patterns);
- evaluate some proposed improvements to the architecture of the DNS; and
- experiment with aggressive caching and pre-fetching mechanisms.
You can help us!
If you are the administrator of a zone under a gTLD
(COM, NET, ORG, COOP, &c.), and your servers do not generally allow AXFR
requests, you can help us enormously by allowing zone transfers from
128.232.0.31.
Our probe is polite -
it learns which servers are permanently unreachable or refuse all AXFR
requests and backs off rather than insistently querying them for large
numbers of domains.
If
you've reached this page because you've seen an entry in your logs from
our probe, we'd be delighted if you could either let us know that your
servers will now accept requests from us, or send us a copy of your zone
file by some other means.
People
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