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"Unnecessary Traffic Saturating a Key Internet 'Root' Server" Newswise (01/24/03)
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 12:45:44 -0500
------ Forwarded Message From: Marcia Boalen <boalen () HQ ACM ORG> Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 11:54:15 -0500 To: TECHNEWS () LISTSERV2 ACM ORG Subject: ACM TechNews; Friday, January 24, 2003 "Unnecessary Traffic Saturating a Key Internet 'Root' Server" Newswise (01/24/03) Scientists at the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) have found that 98 percent of the address mapping requests sent to the Internet's 13 root servers are unnecessary. The researchers studied 152 million requests sent on Oct. 4, 2002, to one root server in California for their analysis, which they will present to Richard A. Clarke, chairman of the federal Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, later this month. Clarke has warned that the Domain Name System (DNS) and its 13 root servers are vulnerable and could disrupt the entire Internet if attacked simultaneously. Such an attack did occur in October of last year, but damage was minimal. The SDSC scientists discovered that about 70 percent of all received traffic was duplicated, and suggested that ISPs and lower-tier servers could cache the answers to these queries in order to reduce the load at the top level. The study also found that approximately 12 percent of requests were for nonexistent top-level domains, and that 7 percent had the IP address embedded within the request, making it frivolous. SDSC researcher Duane Wessels says a major source of the bad requests was the result of misconfigured firewall and packet filter software that bounced back responses from the DNS. The system requesting the data therefore kept sending queries. Wessels created a tool for server administrators called dnstop that can help identify and fix these misconfigurations. http://www.newswise.com/articles/2003/1/SDSCROOT.UCD.html ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To unsubscribe or update your address, click http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- "Unnecessary Traffic Saturating a Key Internet 'Root' Server" Newswise (01/24/03) Dave Farber (Jan 24)