AS7500 M-ROOT-DNS WIDE Project

M-ROOT-DNS, the AS of the WIDE Project, the Japanese research consortium

that operates m.root-servers.net, one of the thirteen DNS root servers.

What it's used for

• Announcing the address space that carries the M root name server, served from anycast nodes around the world.
• WIDE Project research and operational infrastructure in Japan.

Notable

• Only about 1,024 IPv4 addresses, but 202.12.27.33 is one of the thirteen addresses every DNS resolver on the internet may query when it starts a lookup from the root. rDNS confirms it: the host resolves to M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
• Critical DNS infrastructure, not eyeball, hosting or enterprise space. It has no honest "kind" in a commercial network taxonomy, and geolocating it to a single country is misleading: the prefix is announced from many anycast sites at once.
• Sibling root-server ASNs carded here include [AS3557](https://asn.ipinfo.app/AS3557) (F-root, ISC) and [AS5927](https://asn.ipinfo.app/AS5927) (G-root).

Interesting

• WIDE is an academic/industry research consortium, not a carrier, which makes M one of the few root servers run by a research project rather than a company, university or government body. The same project has long been central to Japan's internet research, including early IPv6 work.