The root of the matter: hints or slaves

We consider the possibility of having a (recursive) name server act as a slave to the root zone, rather than caching information after it is requested. Tests, described here, indicate that this technique seems to be comparable to the traditional hints mechanism for moderately busy name servers and may offer other benefits such as reducing the number of bogus requests going to the root servers. With further refinement the technique may be operationally useful, but the impact on root servers would have to be fully assessed.