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But can we continue to get cheap, and more importantly /good/ service from our ISPs with spiraling bandwidth usage? How many ISPs have switched to packet shaping, 'fair usage' unlimited policies and longer contracts already? It is in the Internet's best interests to use the network efficiently, even if that's BrittenySpears.jpg or not.

They aren't talking about bandwidth, they are saying that Vista will double the load on DNS servers, which are already running at close to capacity. This is just hype, though - as the load on the DNS servers increases, more will just be brought online to cope with it. Its not like everyone will be upgrading in 1 day - that might cause some problems.

Vista actually isn't the first version of Windows to support IPv6. IPv6 first shipped with Windows 2000. It was mainly a research stack then, but was later updated. XP was the first version of Windows to ship with a fully supported IPv6 stack. The XP stacks were replaced in Vista with a rewritten, hybrid stack that supports both v4 and v6 instead of having seperate stacks for each protocol as in previous versions of Windows. The UI and in-box applications were also updated in Vista to natively support v6.

Hey buddy, newsflash-- You have no idea what you're talking about.

This is about the INTERNET, and any sysadmin worth his salt would filter/limit what traffic goes from his local network to the public one.

It does exist, it's WSUS (Windows Server Update Services):

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/downloa...

"In reality, is the DHCP server if IPv4, Vista does an IPv4 DNS query, not both."

Eh, not at all. DHCP have nothing to do with this.
When you have an IPv6 enabled interface that interface will always have an address, the link-local address. This address is automatically configured, part of the standards and exist wether you want it or not.
Of course, wether an application tries to lookup an AAAA (IPv6) address first or an A (IPv4) address is entirely up to the application. Simply having IPv6 enabled doesnt in itself cause any increase in the number of queries.
And even if it did, it's not like it's a herculean task to add some more boxes to already clustered/load-balanced DNS server farms.

"This just the usual anti-Microsft FUD designed to rile up the OSS fanatics."

I don't think Mockapetris is an OSS fanatic but in this case he fail to take into account that it's not all that difficult (or costly) to just add more hardware to cope with the increased load (if there will be one).

So the answer to the question "Will Vista Stall Net Traffic, or Not?" is "No".

I don't think Mockapetris is an OSS fanatic but in this case he fail to take into account that it's not all that difficult (or costly) to just add more hardware to cope with the increased load (if there will be one).


It's not as easy to add horsepower to the root servers as you might think. True, it's not a herculean task, but it's not as easy as throwing another box in a rack down at the colo.

There are some interesting papers floating around about the scalability of the root name server set up.

Of particular interest is the hierarchical anycast system used by ISC's F root server and how it manages the interaction among the servers spread over the 37 sites that compose the F server.

"It's not as easy to add horsepower to the root servers as you might think."

But the scenario at hand doesn't primarily affect the root servers.

"Of particular interest is the hierarchical anycast system used by ISC's F"

In Januari 2005 anycast was used by 6 of the root servers (i cant recall exactly which ones) and I'm sure this number hasn't decreased since then.

You forgot - the catch is this is the latest and greatest from Redmond - you know, the guys that don't need any help from the outside world to write their O/S.

I'm still waiting for people to realize that it's MS that's trying to catch up to the rest of the world rather than the world being told by Redmond what they want.

[ edited for spelling ]

Edited 2006-09-08 15:57

" I'm still waiting for people to realize that it's MS that's trying to catch up to the rest of the world rather than the world being told by Redmond what they want."

Problem is that people simply don't know that there's a rest of the world, which is one of two reasons Windows is used by everyone and their mother. I'll leave the second reason to the vivid imagination of y'all.

So has mac os for a couple of years now. The catch I think is that more people use Windows compared to unix derived OS's.

But hey, who the hell is going to use Vista anyways

"adding Vista's ipv6 dns to the current workload of root name servers will slow things down because they're running near capacitly."

Only Vista wont be adding much workload to the root servers since it wont query them, it will only add to the workload of the resolving cache's of ISP's.
Since they are cache's they'll naturally cache results and most people's DNS queries wont result in hits to the root servers (since most people visit the same major sites).
Also mitigating the "mud slide" is the fact that Vista has it's own DNS cache so it wont re-query the ISP servers all the time.

You do realize that Mockapetris took this into account when he made his comment, right?

"You do realize that Mockapetris took this into account when he made his comment, right?"

If he had he wouldn't have made his comment the way he did.

http://lists.oarci.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2006-September/0010...
http://lists.oarci.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2006-September/0010...

Edited 2006-09-09 09:30

Neither of those posts demonstrate that Mockapetris didn't take this into account, only that the authors believe as you do that he didn't.

Anyway, this is a matter of informed speculation by people have a deep understanding of the problem domain that got out of hand when it hit the trade press. The only way we'll know whose SWAG was right is to wait and see.

If the problem is no more than ISP DNS servers near the knee, the solution, as you say, is straightfoward. If the problem does extend to the root, which doesn't seem likely, the solution is harder, but still, as you say, not herculean.