topological closeness....

Sat May 18 19:25:13 UTC 1996

In article <QQapom01899.199605132105 at rodan.UU.NET>,
Mike O'Dell <mo at uunet.uu.net> wrote:
>one other solution (being implemented, I believe), is a DNS server
>that listens to the BGP traffic, so it knows how far away things are,

Another option is to take advantage of the timing information DNS already
keeps track of:

$ORIGIN foobar.com.
www	IN	NS	www1
www	IN	NS	www2
www	IN	NS	www3

Each of those nameservers is actually the webserver... and responds only
with the A record for itself.  Turn down the TTL.  Let DNS caching
take care of the rest...

It doesn't work because, as far as I've seen, the clients (ok, netscape)
doesn't ever requery the DNS.  I'm not sure what state they're at now --
but they're moving towards doing all the resolver work themselves so as
to get multithreaded behaviour.  Maybe we can convince the browser writers
to use ttl.

Dean