Change of address of a root nameserver

2007-11-03 - News - Chris Thompson

The IP address of one of the root nameservers, l.root-servers.net, has changed from 198.32.64.12 to 199.7.83.42. (Such changes are rare: the last one was in January 2004.)

If you are running a nameserver with a root hints zone file, that should be updated. There are a number of ways of generating a new version, but the official with-comments one is at

ftp://ftp.internic.net/domain/named.root

and there is a copy of that locally at

http://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk/ipreg/nsconfig/db.cache

Modern versions of BIND 9 have a compiled-in version of the root hints zone to use if none is defined in the configuration file. As a result of this change, the compiled-in version will be out of date for existing BIND versions: a corrected version has been promised for the next versions of BIND 9.3.x, 9.4.x and 9.5.x.

Using a slightly out-of-date root hints zone is unlikely to cause serious problems, but it is something that should not be allowed to persist indefinitely.