Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) is active in the region and globally supporting the Internet community in a number of ways. APNIC provides financial, technical, and informational support to the Internet community to promote the growth of the Internet, particularly in developing economies where financial and logistical barriers hinder the deployment of Internet services. The APNIC Secretariat continues its efforts to improve the reach and effectiveness of its activities throughout the region through Community Liaison. Outreach activities are directed towards communities in developing economies and allows participation in events that may otherwise be unreachable.
APNIC’S ROOT SERVER DEPLOYMENTS
The 13 root nameservers or ‘rootserver’ each have an identifying letter, from A-M. However, while only 13 names are used for the root namesevers, there are many more physical servers. Some exist in only one instance while others, such as C, F, I, J, K, L, and M servers all exist in multiple locations on different continents. These duplicates use anycast address announcements to provide a completely decentralized service.
Having multiple servers distributed around the world provides high performance DNS lookup independent of the user’s location as the request does not have to be dealt with by a single remote instance of the nameserver.
In 2002, APNIC announced a project to assist the community to establish several new rootserver sites into the Asia Pacific region. Those were done initially by installing mirror copies of the F-Root server which is being operated by the ISC (Internet Software Consortium, the non-profit organisation. These copies will be announced into the Internet routing system using the “BGP anycast” technique, which ensures the traffic from any location to the F-Root directed to the nearest server site. APNIC assists in the deployment of these rootservers providing techncial support. Many of the sites are either fully, or at least partially, funded by APNIC. The rootserver deployments are then maintained by the operator, as ‘anycast’ mirror copies of existing rootservers. In December 2005, F-Root nameservers is installed at Dhaka, Bangladesh at BDIX premises.
Through this project, APNIC is providing root services throughout the region, with substantially improved reachability and response times that will be of noticeable benefit to Asia Pacific ISPs and end-users alike. The new servers are placed in locations to reach the largest possible Internet user base, including diverse IP transit providers, and carrier-neutral Internet exchanges.
