dns based loadbalancing/failover

Sun Oct 7 00:14:27 UTC 2001

On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 01:20:27PM -0700, Paul Vixie wrote:
> 
> > The really neat thing is that you can do this with any nameserver. Install
> > N nameservers and connect each of them to one of your ISPs. These
> > nameservers are all masters, and all contain different data. 
> 
> If you have several nameservers all pretending to be masters for some zone
> but offering different responses based on IP locality, predictive performance,
> or any other criteria, then the name for this is: "broken."

There obviously is a need for an 'official' method to do global load
balancing using DNS. Let's face it, people are doing it now on a not
so large scale but that is rapidly changing because of the introduction
of both hardware and software solutions that (mis)use DNS to overcome
it's current limitation.

I'm not very interested in the discussion why this behaviour would be
broken. It's for more interesting to talk about improving DNS so that
there will be room for things like load balancing or dynamic DNS. In
such a way that people will not start screaming when they see TTLs of
30 seconds or non-linear behaviour of load balancers.

Regards,

 Stefan