Rapid DNS Updates in September

By Blane Warrene | July 13, 2004 | Open Source

In a post making its way across the Internet community quickly, Matt Larson of VeriSign’s Naming and Directory Services (VNDS), has confirmed his organization will begin publishing registrar’s domain name changes every five seconds starting on September 8, 2004.

Larson’s group is responsible for the twice daily DNS updates of .com/.net zone files to the 13 authoritative root name servers at the core of name services on the Internet.

This should enable changes made to name servers by registrars to become available within five minutes in many cases instead of 24-36 hours in many cases.

The VNDS will continue to publish .com/.net zone files twice daily to accommodate new domains coming online.

Larson posted the communication to the North American Network Operators (NANOG) list, whose archives can be found here.

Written By:

Blane Warrene

Blane is a writer and researcher focusing on Apple and Open Source technologies. Prior to this, he helped found a commercial software and consulting venture, and worked in the financial services sector as a director of technology and in varying technical roles. Blane maintains Open Sourcery: SitePoint's Open Source Blog.

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{ 9 comments }

bwarrene October 9, 2004 at 8:54 am: This went live on time according to VeriSign representatives…..I was looking into this myself back in September to insure it did..
WhSox21 September 12, 2004 at 4:21 am: …September… Any updates on anything about this?
JayBee July 25, 2004 at 10:21 pm: Doesn’t dyndns.org already do this?
Jeremy July 25, 2004 at 7:43 pm: The reason the refresh times are what they are now is because of network traffic. We could all set our DNS servers to 5 seconds if we wanted, and watch the internet crawl to a stop. Sure, there is more bandwidth available, but the bottom line is, if you are transfering the same information across lines every 5 seconds, you are wasting bandwidth.
jdc July 23, 2004 at 10:20 pm: Five seconds? Absurd. I have a feeling this is going to impact server load quite significantly.
Five minutes seems much more reasonable.
But still, folks, remember: it’s VeriSign. When September rolls around, don’t forget that.
Ben Curtis July 21, 2004 at 3:49 pm: You mean InterNIC/VeriSign, not ICANN. ICANN has trouble paying the bills, and isn’t involved in this decision at all.
My big worry is: won’t this mean that a hack attack against their datbase now has to be caught and fixed within 5 seconds? Isn’t that a gaping big hole?
Scott July 21, 2004 at 8:24 am: It’s about time that ICANN did something beneficial to someone other than their fat wallet.
Dangermouse July 13, 2004 at 2:10 pm: wow, great!
Jake July 13, 2004 at 11:01 am: Awesome!