Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?

Sun Apr 14 16:26:36 UTC 2013

If this is for http and similar user-accessed (not machine accessed)
traffic, you could do what some large manufacturers and shipping companies
do: Provide a (relatively) low-bandwidth "Select where you are in the
world" global landing page which then redirects to a different
domain/subdomain for each region.  This also lets them direct relatively
localized content easily. For example, panasonic.com can list items sold
mass-market for the US, panasonic.nl for the Netherlands, and
panasonic.com.au for Australia.  Yes, you may well run into times that a
user in the US goes to the .au site because s/he wants to research an .au
product that isn't detailed on the US page but this is not the bulk of your
traffic (and, if through stats, you find it becomes so, you can work on
your design so that it isn't).

- Eric

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 11:28 PM, Constantine A. Murenin <mureninc at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Dear NANOG@,
>
> Not every operator has the ability to setup their own anycast.
>
> Not every operator is big enough to be paying 25 USD/month for a
> managed GeoDNS solution, just to get their hands on GeoDNS.  (Hey, for
> 25$/mo, I might as well have an extra POP or two!)
>
> Why so many years after the concept has been introduced and has been
> found useful, can one not setup GeoDNS in under 5 minutes on one's own
> infrastructure, or use GeoDNS from any of the plentiful free or
> complementary DNS solutions that are offered by providers like he.net,
> xname.org, linode.com and others?
>
> I'm an NSD3 user and have a POP in Europe and NA, and, frankly, the
> easiest (and only) solution I see right now is, on both servers,
> running two copies of `nsd` on distinct sockets, and redirecting
> incoming DNS traffic through a firewall based on IPv4 /8 address
> allocation (RIPE and AfriNIC -- to an `nsd` instance with zone files
> with an `A` record of a POP in Europe; ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC and the
> rest of /8 allocations -- an `A` record for NA), with zone replication
> managed through git.  Yeap, it's rough, and quite ugly, and
> unmaintainable, and will give optimal results only in 80 to 95 per
> cent of actual cases, and will not benefit from the extra webapp
> redundancy one otherwise might have had, but what other alternatives
> could be configured in 5 or 15 minutes?
>
> Any plans to make DNS itself GeoDNS-friendly?
>
> When editing a zone file in `emacs`, why can one not say that one has
> 3 web servers -- Europe, NA, Asia -- and have the dns infrastructure
> and/or the web-browser figure out the rest?
>
> Why even stop there:  all modern browsers usually know the exact
> location of the user, often with street-level accuracy.  It should be
> possible to say that you have a server in Fremont, CA and Toronto, ON
> or Beauharnois, QC, and automatically have all East Coast users go to
> Toronto, and West Coast to Fremont.  Why is there no way to do any of
> this?
>
> Cheers,
> Constantine.
>
>