B.root-servers.net

B-Root Supports ICANN DNS Magnitude Study

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:22:00 +0000

USC/ISI’s b.root-servers.net team has started providing DNS Magnitude statistics in late October 2025 as part of an ongoing ICANN study of TLD use.

DNS Magnitude estimates the popularity of a domain using a metric that considers how many unique clients access the domain. ICANN has developed a tool that estimates unique clients in a privacy-preserving way, estimating the number of queriers without sharing actual IP addresses. USC has integrated this tool into our DNS statistics package.

As part of B-Root’s research focus, we hope that participating in this study will help support continued evolution of the Internet’s DNS system.

B-Root completes Amsterdam to Frankfurt move

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 23:25:00 +0000

USC/ISI’s root DNS server (b.root-servers.net) has finished moving from Amsterdam to Frankfurt. We stopped anycast service in Amsterdam on 2025-06-02, and we resumed service at Frankfurt on 2025-08-18.

This instance is kindly hosted by Go Daddy, and we thank them for their continued network and data-center support as they transition our infrastructure from one data center to another.

Please address any questions about B-Root operations to b-poc (at) isi.edu.

B-Root moving from Amsterdam to Frankfurt

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

USC/ISI’s root DNS server (b.root-servers.net) is in the process of moving from Amsterdam to Frankfurt. We stopped anycast service in Amsterdam on 2025-06-02, and we expect service to start at Frankfurt in late June 2025.

This instance is kindly hosted by Go Daddy, and we thank them for their continued network and data-center support as they transition our infrastructure from one data center to another.

Please address any questions about B-Root operations to b-poc (at) isi.edu.

TLS CA trust anchor certificate available

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

USC/ISI’s root service provides DNS over TLS support to b.root-servers.net. The Certificate Authority (CA) we use to anchor our PKIX (X.509) certificates can now be downloaded from our TLS web page.

Incomplete RSSAC-002 data from 2024-08-29 to -09-02

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 15:10:00 +0000

Due to a problem in data collection for RSSAC-002 statistics, B-Root RSSAC-002 statistics from 2024-08-29 to -09-02 are incomplete as data from one of our six sites was not counted.

This site (“IAD”, near Washington, DC) correctly served traffic over the whole period, but we failed to properly account for that traffic.

We have corrected this problem, but unfortunately we cannot change our historical data. Based on operational measurements, we expect that our service counts are about 70% of their true values for that period.

We expect to improve our internal monitoring to detect this class of problem more rapidly in the future.

New addresses for b.root-servers.net

Tue, 16 May 2023 18:00:00 +0000

USC/ISI is renumbering both its IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for b.root-servers.net on 2023-11-27. Our new IPv4 address will be 170.247.170.2 and our new IPv6 address will be 2801:1b8:10::b. USC/ISI will continue to support root service over our current IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for at least one year (until 2024-11-27) in order to provide a stable transition period while new root hints files are distributed in software and operating system packages.

We are renumbering to increase the resilience of the Root Servers System by further diversifying the number of Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) that have allocated IP addresses to Root Server Operators. Our addresses will be the first in the Root Server System to have been allocated by LACNIC and our routes will be verifiable through LACNIC’s Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) Trust Anchor Location (TAL). We thank LACNIC for helping make this renumbering possible, and ARIN for supporting our prior addressing assignments.

Update on 2023-05-30: LACNIC posted a separate announcement about this renumbering.

B-Root's anycast instance in Chile is moving

Fri, 05 May 2023 18:00:00 +0000

USC/ISI’s root DNS server (b.root-servers.net) is in the process of moving our anycast instance currently located in Arica, Chile to Santiago, Chile. We stopped service from Arica on 2023-03-06, and we expect the Santiago instance to begin service in early May, 2023. We moved this instance at the request of our hosts PIT Chile, and we thank them for their continued network and data-center support.

(¡Gracias a PIT Chile por ayudarnos de nuevo!)

Please address any questions about B-Root operations to b-poc (at) isi.edu.

El servador raíz de DNS de USC/ISI (b.root-servers.net) en Sudamerica, localizado en Arica, Chile está siendo trasladado a Santiago, Chile. Detuvimos el servicio en Arica a contar del 6 de marzo de 2023, y esperamos que reanudar el servicio en Santiago a principios de mayo del 2023. Migramos éste servicio a petición de nuestros anfitriones PIT Chile, por lo que les agradecemos su continuo soporte de red y centro de datos.

(Thanks again to PIT Chile for their support!)

Por favor dirija cualquier pregunta sobre las operaciones de B-Root a b-poc (at) isi.edu.

B-Root Offers Experimental Support for DNS over TLS

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

B-Root has begun support for DNS-over-TLS (DoT) on port 853 on an experimental basis. Our goal is to allow researchers and operators to test support for DoT to an authoritative DNS root server. We plan to work with the DNS community to determine whether or not DoT to the Root Server System is a useful addition. Please reach out to us by e-mail to b-poc@isi.edu with any feedback or questions.

Note: Our support for DoT is not a permanent commitment at this time, and we may withdraw support for DoT support at any time. Operational support for UDP and TCP will be prioritized over support for DoT.

We would like to thank our collaborators at Google for the initial testing of our DoT support under a joint project.

B-Root Software Diversity With Bind and Knot

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 08:00:00 +0000

To promote software diversity, B-Root is now running a mix of both Knot and Bind on our servers.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Bind and Knot developers (ISC and CZ.NIC respectively), for providing and maintaining their high quality, open-source authoritative DNS server software.

Correcting Partial RSSAC-002 data for B-Root from 2020-03-24 to 2020-05-19

Wed, 20 May 2020 08:37:00 +0000

Due to a problem in our data processing pipeline, B-Root’s RSSAC-002v4 data from 2020-03-24 to 2020-05-19 were incomplete. Data for that period included only half of B-Root’s sites.

We have corrected this problem and updated our results based on our archived data.

In addition, we were missing RSSAC data for 2019-04-28 and 2020-05-04. We have filled in both of those days.

We have adjusted our processing pipeline to avoid this problem in the future.