RE: one-letter domains

[billc@pegasus.mail.att.net (WJCarpenter)]

gwh> a*.com		IN	NS	ns-a.com-nic.net
gwh> ...would work.  The only changes required would be to root
gwh> servers, not normal site ones, and it shouldn't be that hard to

What would this accomplish exactly?  I think it actually makes things
(slightly) worse as far as Workload of the Universe is concerned.
Suppose I want to get something about buzz.artichoke.com...

Current way:

	I query root servers for "buzz.artichoke.com"
	Root server points me to server for "artichoke.com"
	Further queries about "*.artichoke.com" don't involve root
	    servers

Proposed way:

	I query root servers for "buzz.artichoke.com"
	Root server points me to "ns-a.com-nic.net"
	"ns-a.com-nic.net" points me to server for "artichoke.com"
	Further queries about "*.artichoke.com" don't involve root
	    servers

Neither way helps me especially in doing the next query for
"*.arthropod.com".  On the other hand, a sort of a protocol change
that allowed DNS responses of the form

	art*.com       NS   ns-art.com-nic.net

would save me some trips to the root servers for subsequent queries if
my local server recognized these newfangled wildcard NS records.

Protocol changes aren't that popular an item these days (though this
isn't a change to the on-the-wire protocol, only to how
implementations interpret the responses; it's somewhere between a
local matter and a bits'n'bytes protocol change).  However, if a way
could be cooked up to grandfather current implementations, it might be
workable.

Suppose the root servers responded with this sort of thing:

	;;Answers
	artichoke.com  NS   artichoke-ns.someplace.com
	;; (the real DNS server for "artichoke.com")

	;;Additional
	art*.com       NS   ns-art.com-nic.net
	;; (the second tier root covering the wildcard mentioned)

The packets get bigger, but only in the additional info part.  Current
servers which don't understand the wildcard NS records would still get
responses at the same cost as current behavior.  (Actually, they'll
cache some of the additional info NS records and not use them, so
that's a slight extra cost ... the price of progress leaving you
behind. :-)  Next generation servers which do understand the wildcard
NS records get the first response at the same cost as current behavior
but get subsequent responses at lower cost if they happen to be
covered by a wildcard NS in their cache.

(I'm assuming the talk about burden on the root servers is due to the
number of queries and not the quantity of data held.)
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