Never mind that. Look at how they are distributed in terms of IP (v4) addresses. 198.41.0.4 192.228.79.201 192.33.4.12 128.8.10.90 192.203.230.10 192.5.5.241

Never mind that. Look at how they are distributed in terms of IP (v4) addresses. 198.41.0.4 192.228.79.201 192.33.4.12 128.8.10.90 192.203.230.10 192.5.5.241 192.112.36.4 128.63.2.53 192.36.148.17 192.58.128.30 193.0.14.129 199.7.83.42 202.12.27.33 Back off to the /3 level. All but two of them (128.8.10.90 and 128.63.2.53) are in 192.0.0.0/3. Guess what happens if someone fat-fingers a sync connection and adds one with a netmask of /3 instead of /30? If it's in the right part of the net, you lose a whole bunch of stuff, but two of the roots keep working. This makes for some very interesting troubleshooting. I witnessed this once, and it was bizarre: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/08/blackhole/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/08/blackhole/ I wonder what else might be tripped up by this kind of aggregation gone wrong? It seems like spreading them out some more could be useful in some really bad situations. Edit: also, look at the /4 and /5 level and so on. Most of them have a lot in common, actually.