Ira Magaziner, President Clinton’s senior advisor on internet issues, acknowledged this week that the timing of the recent re- direction by the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) of five of the internet’s root servers to its servers in California was a bit dicey. Jon Postel, who runs IANA under contract from the Department of Defense, rearranged the flow of root zone information, containing information about where every domain name in the world is located to the servers at the University of Southern California where he works. Postel is largely responsible for building up the root system, and has been doing it for a lot longer than NSI has had its federal contract to look after A (five years, ending March 31). It is understood that Postel reconfigured five of the 12 other root servers around the country and overseas to make them get their root zone file updates from his machine, rather than from the A root server at NSI’s Herndon, Virginia headquarters. However, Magaziner he said that IANA, run by Jon Postel, was perfectly within its rights to run such a test. Magaziner said that after talking to Postel last week, Postel acknowledged that the timing looked strange but the government, which funds IANA thought it best that Postel completed the test anyhow, which he has yet to do. NSI said that as of yesterday, Postel had not yet directed the root zone operators to return to normal traffic. Magaziner said that neither the government, or NSI had been informed of the test, although similar tests had been run in the past. In fact, NSI said the use of the term ‘test’ was not used until the event became public., from his machine, rather than from the A root server at NSI’s Herndon, Virginia headquarters. Some in the community said it was Postel flexing his muscles at such a crucial point in the internet’s domain name systems’ history. And some have even called for his arrest, but Magaziner said I admire and trust the man and have no reason to question his motives…I’d be sure to cut him a lot of slack. However, he did say, I don’t think we’ll see it happen again.
