Together with our partner The Measurement Factory, Infoblox has just competed our fifth annual DNS Survey.  We're still poring over the results, but one number that stands out to me is our latest estimate of the total population of name servers on the Internet, which has jumped to 16.3 million name servers this year from 11.7 million in 2007.  (2008's results were a little suspect.)

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...especially at the expense of the excellent folks who run .SE, but wasn't I just writing last month about everything that can go wrong in a manually administered DNS environment?  In fact, didn't I specifically say:

"Use a trailing dot to prevent the origin from being appended to a domain name.  After editing a zone data file, increment the serial number and reload. Forget any one of those and you've caused an operational issue, maybe even an outage."

Well, it looks like .SE had one of those very problems.

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Last week, VeriSign and ICANN presented some fairly detailed information about signing the root zone using DNSSEC, the DNS Security Extensions.  The Department of Commerce had previously announced that VeriSign and ICANN would jointly administer the signed root, but until yesterday it wasn't clear (to me, anyway) how their responsibilities would be divided.  At RIPE 59 in Lisbon, Joe Abley of ICANN and Matt Larson of VeriSign (yes, my former business partner and the other half of "The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast") talked about the division of labor.

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