Odd DNS responses for www.neopets.com

Thu Feb 6 03:44:38 UTC 2003

When I worked for NeoPets in the summer of 2000 they had a server farm about
that size. It was behind a NetFoundry (I think) Load Balancer at the time.
Perhaps their load balancer died and they had to get back up in a hurry.

Thanks,

Adam "Tauvix" Debus
Linux Certified Professional, Linux Certified Administrator #447641
Network Administrator, ReachONE Internet
adam at reachone.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Deepak Jain" <deepak at ai.net>
To: "Alex Lambert" <alambert at quickfire.org>; "Stephen Milton"
<milton at isomedia.com>; <nanog at merit.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 7:40 PM
Subject: RE: Odd DNS responses for www.neopets.com

>
> >
> > > Maybe it's just me, but isn't there something odd about a DNS query
> > > coming back with 78 entries for the same host?  It sends back an UDP
> > > packet that gets truncated and the DNS resolver reverts to TCP to get
> > > the full list.
> >
> > This is often used for server pools (as I'm guessing you know).
> >
> > > It seems to cause problems with Windows clients and/or Windows DNS
> > > servers.  Seems like overkill.
> >
> > The 78 addresses listed here are all in one bit of a /24. In the
> > cases I've
> > seen, there are a few servers listed in several different locations,
> > network- (and location-) wise. I agree that this looks really
> > weird. Perhaps
> > they use it as a cheap load balancer?
> >
>
>
> Perhaps they use it to pad their IP allocations??
>
> DJ
>