[CS-FSLUG] What if DNS goes down?

[Sophie Hamilton]

On 9/18/09, Frank Bax <fbax at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>  I was under the impression that these 13 "root servers" know where the name
> server is for each tld; so a client would next query the name server for a
> particular tld.  If the nameservers for a particular ccTLD were taken down
> (Ed's question); then would not all sites for that country be down after ttl
> expired?

You're right in a sense; however, I thought Ed as talking about *the*
root nameservers.

But that would only affect how traffic gets routed to those sites with
that ccTLD. Ed's example was that a ruler wanted to shut the Net down
entirely, as I understood it.

More likely is sjm's response - that it just means access to the
servers would be blocked. That's a more serious problem, but one for
the ISPs to solve. Most likely, the ISPs would host their own local
'root' that was only accessible for the ISP itself or its subscribers,
and everything would be fine.

 - Sophie.