History of 4.2.2.2. What's the story?

[auser at mind.net (Steve Ryan)]

I think around 10 years ago Slashdot had a few stories (and still do, 
actually) about how great these resolvers were.  I think that propelled 
quite a bit of their growth and popularity.

On 2/14/2010 1:16 AM, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> I've wondered about this for years, but only this evening did I start
> searching for details.  And I really couldn't find any.
>
> Can anyone point me at distant history about how 4.2.2.2 came to be, in my
> estimation, the most famous DNS server on the planet?
>
> I know that it was originally at BBN, what I'm looking for is things like:
>
>     How the IP was picked.  (I'd guess it was one of the early DNS servers,
>           and the people behind it realized that if there was one IP address
>           that really needed to be easy to remember, it was the DNS server,
>           for obvious reasons).
>     Was it always meant to be a public resolver?
>     How it continued to remain an open resolver, even in the face of
>           amplifier attacks using DNS resolvers.  Perhaps it has had
>           rate-limiting on it for a long time.
>     There's a lot of conjecture about it using anycast, anyone know anything
>           about it's current configuration?
>
> So, if anyone has any stories about 4.2.2.2, I'd love to hear them.
>
> Thanks,
> Sean
>