.ORG problems this evening

Thu Sep 18 15:19:49 UTC 2003

In a message written on Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 10:05:15AM -0400, Todd Vierling wrote:
> Anycast is *NOT* a "redundancy and reliability" system when dealing with
> application-based services like DNS.  Rather, anycast is a geographically

I think you'll find most people on the list would disagree with you
on this point.  Many ISP's run anycast for customer facing DNS
servers, and I'll bet if you ask the first reason why isn't because
they provide faster service, or distribute load, but because the
average customer only wants one or two IP's to put in his DNS config,
and gets real annoyed when they don't work.  So it is a redundancy
and reliability thing, the customer can configure (potentially) one
address, and the ISP can have 10 servers for it so if one dies all
is well.

Is it appropriate for a gTLD?  Now that's a whole different can of
worms.  Personally I think they should return the two anycast
addresses, and as many actual server addresses as will fit in the
packet.  This is the best of both worlds.  When it works, geographicly
distributed load, redundancy at the IP layer, quick responces.  When
one of the failure modes is encountered (eg, stuck route) DNS has
the information it needs to switch to a backup as well.

Redundancy is good.  Redundancy at two levels is even better,
particularly when they can back each other up.  Plus, in this case it
costs them nothing, they just have to tweek a config.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
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