News from PANUG - February 14, 2001
Valentines Day Edition

http://www.panug.org
info@panug.org

ANNA KOURNIKOVA VIRUS

Viruses such as this steal time away from your other
responsibilities and force you to spend time dealing with
the problem. But some of us took note of the new virus,
shook our heads in amazement, and promptly returned to
our work because we're seldom victims of such simple
attacks that apparently affect millions of others.

Gregg Berkholtz, PANUG's President, reports that his
company leverages Linux-based technologies to front-end
a GroupWise mail system to prevent most of these simplistic
attacks. Gregg will speak about this at PANUG's monthly
meeting this Thursday evening.


DNS FUN FACTS

At the very top of the Domain Name System (DNS) there are
13 root servers that get asked a lot of DNS queries.
Recently, one of the administrators of these servers
commented on just how many DNS queries are asked and
answered.

Most of the root servers run at around 3000 qps. The qps
measure is "queries per second". This is about
259,200,000 queries per day.

One of the root servers is special. It's the master of all
the root servers and its traffic is higher. It gets an
average of 12,000 qps or 1,036,800,000 (about 1*10^9)
queries per day.

These servers need to be reliable because the entire Internet
depends on them. They all run some form of Unix and all run
BIND. In many cases, the root servers are one computer. Others
are two or more computers operating as one.