[RSSAC Caucus] [Ext] FOR REVIEW: RSSAC026v2: RSSAC Lexicon

[Paul Vixie]

On Thursday, 30 January 2020 13:56:04 UTC Karl Reuss wrote:
> On 1/29/20 8:33 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
> > we have dispensed with 'site' and 'location' as relationships which would
> > define a 'portion of' as a 'root server instance', and that's good (says
> > me).
> Personally, I'm not ready to give up on location/site as part of the RSSAC
> definition for instance.  When we're at an RSSAC meeting discussing
> instances, location is the primary way we identify them. I really liked the
> plain language Wes used in his recent definitions and i'm concerned your
> more technically accurate definition will confuse much of our RSSAC
> audience.

as before, there have been, are now, and will be cases where two instances of 
the same identifier are in adjacent racks in some data center that has more 
than one internet exchange present. location will be the same. SFO1 and SFO2 
might be in different parts of the san francisco airport's region, or they 
might be in the same rack but with disjoint upstream connectivity.

this is a topologic location difference without a geographic location 
difference. it is the topologic location that matters.

> > "A root server instance is the portion of a root server operator's
> > infrastructure [dedicated to serving] root data at one [or more] of the IP
> > addresses associated with a root server identifier [and having
> > connectivity disjoint from all other instances of the same server]."
> 
> What differentiates the connectivity between C-root's New York and Chicago
> instances?  I assume (perhaps wrongly) that they are both connected to
> Cogent's network and fall under a common BGP routing policy.  To me, you
> need to use location to best describe that difference.

ingress and egress paths are very different for new york vs. chicago, if 
queries are coming from nearby one or the other. only in the case where the 
query source is quite distant from both, will there be ingress or egress path 
similarity among query sources. but since our network is global, anything far 
enough away from new york and chicago to yield path blending, will likely be 
closer to some other instance. that's why topological location is important.

-- 
Paul