AfriNIC, The Regional Internet Registry for Africa, as per its mission "To serve the African community by providing professional and efficient management of Internet Number Resources, supporting Internet technology usage and development, and promoting Internet self governance" and in collaboration with national and regional IXPs, is launching an Anycast Root Server Project which aims to increase the number of instances of root servers in the African region.

The project aims at supporting well established IXPs in the African Region to deploy instances of root servers. AfriNIC will facilitate contact with Root Server Operators and provide where needed, financial and technical support for the local deployment (mainly equipment purchases and technical setup). AfriNIC will engage in one-to-one discussions with participant Root Server Operators to get the formal agreements and discuss requirements for Anycast copy deployment .

Based on such agreements, AfriNIC will publish the agreed upon requirements for the use of IXP(s) and will allow the them to decide by their own which requirement (server operator) better suits their local environment and situation. All IXPs joining this program will have to sign an agreement with AfriNIC. AfriNIC will not be the root copy operator but play a facilitator role. Each candidate must be responsible for the local support needed for the deployed infrastructure.

The project will be deployed in several steps:

1 Workshop

AfriNIC have organized a workshop with identified Root Server Operators and IXP technical contacts/representatives. The workshop provided an opportunity for RO to explain their infrastructure and requirements to the IXP operators. This workshop also covered Anycast technology in general and the advantage of deploying root servers at exchange points.

2 Partnership

AfriNIC is seeking partnership with other organisation Root Operators which can provide financial support for the project (mainly to support costs related to copy deployment). ISOC and NSRC have already expressed their strong support to the innitiative.

continues to >>Why local copies of root servers are important