4 ms·

DNS is a distributed system, basically a giant distributed database. I don't know why the article calls it a centralized system.

• peterwwillis 8y ago
  The records themselves are centralized. You can't get an authoritative name from anywhere except the authoritative name server. Everything else is just caching and proxying. If a domain's authoritative name server is down, you can't get records for that domain. In a decentralized protocol, other name servers that had nothing to do with that domain could give you the records for the downed nodes. But how do we know it's authentic, or up to date? And now we go down the decentralization rabbit hole...
  • smadge 8y ago
    Thanks!
• y04nn 8y ago
  There is only 13 IPs for DNS Root name servers (928 servers as of 3 June 2018 thanks to anycas) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server http://www.root-servers.org/ http://www.root-servers.org/