1 Jul
2009
1 Jul
'09
1:31 p.m.
Serving the IP of the host best able to serve your user does not sound
like a fringe requirement to me. :)
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?
Kind regards,
[1] http://natalian.org/archives/2009/06/30/HTML5_video_porn/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andy Smith via RT <support(a)rt.bitfolk.com>
Date: 2009/7/1
Subject: Re: [bitfolk.com #1624] DNS service
To: hendry(a)webconverger.com
Hi Kai,
On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 01:06:31PM +0000, Kai Hendry via RT wrote:
2009/7/1 Andy Smith via RT
<support(a)rt.bitfolk.com>om>:
When a client's resolver asks for the list of NS servers for the
domain, the list will be returned then it will pick one at random.
Geographic DNS load balancing in general works by having a more
complicated DNS server work out which of its possible answers is
most likely to be closest to the IP of the resolver that is asking.
Most third party DNS services (including BitFolk's) won't support
this because it's a rather fringe requirement.
In general that won't work. That is, it will
be largely random.
Hmm, I thought DNS had some magic way to resolve to the nearest DNS
server with TTL or something. So I need some sort GEO DNS service? Can you recommend
one?
http://serverfault.com/questions/30567/geo-dns-providers
I'm afraid I can't because I haven't needed one for a long time.
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.
It's a good question for the users mailing list.
Cheers,
Andy
--
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