The experiment to re-direct some of the internet’s root servers to pick up their domain name information from the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA), rather than directly from Network Solutions Inc (NSI), is now complete, according to Jon Postel, the person who has run IANA for as long as anybody cares to remember. Postel said the test demonstrated the internet’s ability to transition through the reconfiguration of the secondary root serves, which is likely to happen for real when the changes to the domain name system, currently being debated, are put into place. His test, which he undertook without the knowledge of NSI or the government, which funds IANA, caused some in the community to view the move as an attempt to hijack the internet. He said the test ran from January 23 to February 4. Postel added that the data that the secondary root servers (five of them in all) received was the same as they normally receive because IANA got the data from NSI and then passed it on to other secondary root servers. NSI normally serves as the central database (the primary root server) for the internet’s top-level domains, and IANA and 12 other locations round the world house and maintain the secondary root serves that propagate the information about the location of name servers around the world, enabling users to find any domain name on the internet.
