1 Jul
2009
1 Jul
'09
1:48 p.m.
Hi Kai,
On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 02:31:07PM +0100, Kai Hendry wrote:
Serving the IP of the host best able to serve your
user does not sound
like a fringe requirement to me. :)
I don't think it's a service that a significant percentage of
BitFolk's customer base would appreciate -- even if free would not
appreciate slowing down of progress elsewhere.
I have http://static.natalian.org/ mirrored at
67.205.53.240
(California) and 88.198.3.35 (Germany). It's just my personal pictures
and videos. Unsurprisingly video playback [1] from California is a
poor user experience from the UK. Germany is better. So I am looking
for a free personal (low requests) GEO DNS service that serves the IP
of the server closest to my user.
It sounds like a bit of a failing to me of DNS not to be able to
supply this feature via TTL or some clever routing tables. Do I
_really_ need to host my own DNS with a Maxmind hack?
DNS was not designed for this. Some regard "stupid DNS tricks"
involving DNS masters that serve incoherent data to be a gross hack.
People like Paul Vixie for example. The big boys do it with anycast
instead (very much beyond the scope of people with just VPSes
unfortunately)
You can do it with geo dns though and I probably still would if I
needed to.
My mistake below with Mark's name was just a typo BTW: it should be
Mark Bergsma.
http://doc.powerdns.com/geo.html
The "More details" link looks very familiar. :)
Cheers,
Andy
Many years ago when I used to run an IRC network with
a need for
this, we developed a module for PowerDNS which would do this based
on MaxMind's free database of IP network -> geographic location.
The primary developer of this, Mark Bergsa, went on to work for the
Wikimedia Foundation and I believe that Wikipedia now use this
solution. So maybe that would be worth looking into.
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
"What should one say after making love? ``Thank you'' seems too much.
``I'm sorry'' - somehow not enough." -- The League Against Tedium