[162840] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: whoami.akamai.net [was: Google Public DNS Problems?]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Constantine A. Murenin)
Thu May 2 14:43:06 2013
In-Reply-To: <ACD19994-5A28-4960-BB20-A707DA5E6462@ianai.net>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2013 11:42:50 -0700
From: "Constantine A. Murenin" <mureninc@gmail.com>
To: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 2 May 2013 11:12, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net> wrote:
> On May 02, 2013, at 12:12 , Joe Abley <jabley@hopcount.ca> wrote:
>> On 2013-05-02, at 12:10, Joe Abley <jabley@hopcount.ca> wrote:
>>> On 2013-05-02, at 11:59, Charles Gucker <cgucker@onesc.net> wrote:
>
>>>> That's not entirely true. You can easily do lookup for
>>>> whoami.akamai.net and it will return the unicast address for the node
>>>> in question (provided the local resolver is able to do the
>>>> resolution). This is a frequent lookup that I do when I don't know
>>>> what actual anycast node I'm using.
>>>
>>> Using 8.8.8.8 to tell me about whoami.akamai.net tells me what Akamai a=
uthoritative server Google last used to answer that query.
>>
>> Oh, now that I poke at it, it seems like whoami.akamai.net is telling me=
about the address of the resolver I used, rather than the address of the a=
kamai node I hit.
>>
>> Never mind, I understand now :-)
>
> For clarity: Looking up the hostname "whoami.akamai.net" will return the =
IP address in the source field of the packet (DNS query) which reached the =
authoritative name server for Akamai.net.
>
> We use this to look for forwarding or proxying, which is frequently unkno=
wn / invisible to the end user.
>
> It has the side-effect that querying against an anycast server (e.g. 208.=
67.222.222 or 8.8.8.8) will show the unicast address of the anycast node wh=
ich forwarded to our servers.
>
> In case anyone is wondering, we do not do any special logging or watching=
of this hostname. It is logged for a short time on the local hard drive th=
e same as any other DNS query, but unless someone actually looks, we will n=
ot notice if you query for it. So feel free to use it for your own purposes=
as much as you like. We have a bit of spare DNS capacity. :)
No IPv6 at akamai.net, huh? :p
Cns# host whoami.akamai.net
whoami.akamai.net has address 216.66.80.30
Cns# host 216.66.80.30
30.80.66.216.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer tserv1.fra1.he.net.
Cns#
Does anyone run a DNS whoami that's IPv6-ready?
C.
