[81696] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Localized mail servers, global scope
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Thu Jun 23 14:39:39 2005
In-Reply-To: <bb0e440a0506230757790d126f@mail.gmail.com>
Cc: "Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com" <Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com>,
nanog@merit.edu
From: Joe Abley <jabley@isc.org>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:39:20 -0400
To: Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 2005-06-23, at 10:57, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> Wild idea and there's just too much good german beer here at MAAWG
> (www.maawg.org) in Dusseldorf, but .. anybody tried anycasting a
> mailserver?
>
> Operationally that is ...
I know of people who have anycasted the address used by their clients
for mail submission using SMTP (so that clients connect to a stable
address, and the node which services their request varies according
to where they are connecting from).
Like all applications of service distribution using anycast, care is
required: e.g. a stable, internal network with a well-known topology,
and anycast nodes placed such that node selection by clients is
consistent, packet-to-packet, for periods of time far exceeding the
expected maximum transaction time.
The places I have seen this done have had POPs connected with
expensive and congested links, so keeping mail submission from
customers local and snappy was a big win.
I think you're talking about anycasting a server across the Internet
to act as a low-numbered MX, though. I haven't met anybody who
thought that was a good idea, yet. :-)
Joe
