1 Jul
2009
1 Jul
'09
11:48 p.m.
Hello 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. :)
Welcome to our world.
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 conceived as a simple replacement for a /etc/hosts file that was
distributed via FTP. Don't be surprised if it doesn't do exactly what
you want it to without some effort on your part.
What you need is a Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) service.
Unfortunately I don't know of any people who provide such a service
cheaply. Most people who want to load balance between continents have
some sort of budget.
There are some flaws, not least the fact that you can't actually tell
where on the planet someone is by the IP address of their resolver, but
it works fairly well.
Cheers,
Graham
--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it.
-- Don Knuth