The Department of Information Technology along with National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) has installed three Internet root servers in the country at Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. All the three Internet Root Servers were integrated at a function held here today in the presence of Shri Dayanidhi Maran, Minister of Communications & Information Technology, Mr. Paul Wilson, Director General-APNIC and Mr. Axel Pawlik, MD, RIPE.
Speaking on the occasion Shri Dayanidhi Maran said that Internet has pervaded into the length and breadth of the country and the nation is proud to say that no part of it is unserved or uncovered by Internet. "We have also established a state-of the-art Registry which manages the country-code top level domain. We have reached a stage of maturity in bandwidth infrastructure development both domestic and international, and therefore, it was in the fitness of things that we are today host to three Internet root servers", he said. The Minister further said that these root servers are the resolution for the traffic in the time of crisis. These servers will ensure that the traffic crisis is resolved in such a manner that the user will not be aware of the fact that there was a crisis. At the time of crisis every route server will communicate with each other, like the cell phone user whose phone gets connected from one tower to another without the knowledge of the user, Shri Maran said.
The installation and operations is facilitated by Asia Pacific Network Information center (APNIC) and National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI). The STPI has provided all necessary infrastructure support like equipment racks, providing an Internet connectivity, air-conditioning etc. The F-Root server at Chennai is operational from 7th August, 2005. The K-root server has been installed in Delhi and is operational from 17th August, 2005. With the installation of the I-root server in Mumbai today, the integration process is complete.
The installation of Internet Root Servers in the country will help in reducing the expensive international bandwidth load; increase the Internet resiliency i.e. less dependency on root servers abroad; and improve host name resolution (in some cases) from hundreds of millisecond to under-ten millisecond.
Internet Root Servers are part of the Domain Name Systems (DNS), a worldwide distributed database that is used to translate worldwide unique domain names such as www.mit.gov.in to other identifiers. The DNS is an important part of the Internet infrastructure. The root domain name servers form a critical part of the global Internet infrastructure.
Every computer connected to the Internet has its address, expressed in the form of a number, such as 206.112.85.10. This address, known as an IP (Internet Protocol) address is used to route packets of data, allowing email, display of WebPages and other data to get to a desired destination. Some of these addresses are assigned permanently and some are assigned temporarily, but at any given point of time, each computer connected to the Internet has a unique IP address.
In order to translate these numerical IP addresses to human readable names, domain name system (DNS) has been evolved which is hierarchical in nature. It is divided into top level domains (TLDs), with each TLD then being divided into second level and third level domains. The top level domains historically included three letter generic TLDs (gTLDs), such as '.org', '.com', '.net'.
The TLDs also include two-letter country code TLDs (ccTLDs), such as '.in' representing India, '.br' (Brazil), '.nz' (New Zealand), '.ca' (Canada) so on and so forth. Thus the Internet mainly works through the registration and resolution of domain name.
APNIC is a not-for-profit, membership-based organisation in the in the Asia Pacific Region which provides allocation and registration services for IP address for supporting Internet globally. APNIC facilitates the deployment of root servers in cooperation with the official operators of these servers. APNIC's role in root server operations is as a voluntary facilitator and coordinator of root server deployments in Asia Pacific region. Presently, there are 13 root domain name servers operated by a very competent and trusted group of volunteers. The existing Internet architecture is based on these 13 root servers, designated A to M, distributed world wide for efficient resolving of the roots in the domain names.
RM/AMA- 250805 Internet Root Servers
(Release ID :11617)