… That is, assuming lightning is “up to half an hour”.

I can’t believe I’m quoting Slashdot, but here goes:

VeriSign’s DNS Rapid Update notice period (as announced on NANOG mailing list) expires today. Beginning September 9, 2004 the SOA records of the .com and .net zones will be updated every 5 minutes instead of twice a day. The format of the serial number is also changing from the current YYYYMMDDNN to a new one that depicts the UTC time

.

What does this mean? 2 years ago it took 2-3 days for a domain change to become “visible” to the Internet. In the last year that’s dropped to roughly 24 hours (though recently Ensight was available in less than 4). It is now theoretically possible that it could take less than half an hour.

It should be noted that this isn’t a change we’ll see immediately on September 9. Individual ISP’s still choose when they update the cache from the root servers. So this will take time, but hopefully in the next year we will get closer and closer to a “seamless web”.