DNS anycast considered harmful (was: .ORG problems this evening)

Thu Sep 18 12:12:26 UTC 2003

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

: BIND does it but what about Microsoft cache/forwarder? At RIPE 45 (you
: were there), a talk by people at CAIDA showed that A.root-servers.net
: received twice as much traffic as the other root name servers since it
: is just the first one listed...

There's an easy fix to that particular situation:  Make the first (or first
two) listed servers anycast, and the rest unicast.

That gains the distributed nature of anycast to deal with crap like this,
while keeping the ability for DNS servers to find one that is *up*.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> <tv at pobox.com>