[54166] in North American Network Operators' Group

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post

Re: lists of DNS servers by region.

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu)
Thu Dec 12 15:10:25 2002

To: Haesu <haesu@towardex.com>
Cc: Stephen Sprunk <ssprunk@cisco.com>,
	Tatsuya Kawasaki <tatsuya@kivex.com>, nanog ml <nanog@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 12 Dec 2002 14:42:08 EST."
             <Pine.LNX.4.33.0212121436110.26424-100000@bkr.towardex.com> 
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 15:09:36 -0500
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu


--==_Exmh_416770856P
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Thu, 12 Dec 2002 14:42:08 EST, Haesu said:
> 
> > Many DNS "load balancing" solutions will return the address of the web
> > server closest to the _query source_.  This means these systems work best
> > when your recursive DNS servers are topologically closest to your users.
> 
> Correct me if I am wrong.. But..
> 
> I don't think multiple 'A' record load balancing will return the IP
> address of the web server that is closest to the _query_source_. If this
> is true, then Akamai has reinvented the wheel with their near-by DNS
> setup on *.g.akamai.net entries.

Akamai doesn't use the usual round-robin.  They do OTHER magic.

Some solutions use a special magic DNS backend that will launch a PING or
other RTT detector from the multiple service locations, and then return the
location with the lowest RTT.  Of course, this means you're measuring the RTT
from the servers to the user's DNS server - if they're using a DNS server
that's a long way away network-wise, this can produce odd results.

The problem is that the backend doesn't know the source of the original query,
they only know the IP address of the DNS server that's doing the recursion.
-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Senior Engineer
				Virginia Tech


--==_Exmh_416770856P
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001

iD8DBQE9+O0AcC3lWbTT17ARAkn0AJ0QwgqymoJ7MaCzq8TkHkPzMWujHwCg0WfK
oY8lJJ0yNtjBzApWgS7Xn1I=
=qbXM
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--==_Exmh_416770856P--

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post