L3: Google from DC via the Netherlands?

Sat Feb 7 17:03:39 UTC 2009

IMHO, off the top of my head, on a weekend where I haven't had enough coffee
yet:

     3. Anycasted DNS Providers? Not sure how they could fix it, other than
        flag certain domains as special, and do something special for them,
        but man that smells like a hack.

Anycast is a good thing, but when geo-location style concerns are factored
in maybe they should have region-based anycast addresses.

Interestingly, with Google there could be another similar concern WRT the
IPv6 "trusted tester program" (or whatever the correct name of that is)
where the DNS resolver / organization could have sufficient IPv6
connectivity to qualify, but that capability might not expand to the clients
of / hosts within the service.

/TJ

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Peter Beckman [mailto:beckman at angryox.com]
>Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 2:51 PM
>To: nanog at nanog.org
>Subject: RE: L3: Google from DC via the Netherlands?
>
>On Fri, 6 Feb 2009, Peter Beckman wrote:
>
>> I'm OK to that IP as well, but when I query www.google.com, I get
>> multiple IPs, but here are the ones that in in 147:
>>
>> DNS Server                  IP              Route (for me)
>> 205.234.170.217 (tiggee)    74.125.79.147   Amsterdam
>> 208.67.222.222 (opendns)    64.233.183.147  Amsterdam
>> 4.2.2.1 (verizon)           74.125.19.147   San Jose
>> 198.6.1.3 (uu.net/verizon)  74.125.47.147   Washington DC (yay)
>
>  So someone from Google has been helpful in pointing out that the resolver
>  IP, not YOUR IP, is the one that determines where you get routed to when
>  you make a request for www.google.com.  Which is simply due to the way
>  things are implemented, which makes sense.
>
>  The problem is, here I am, just some guy, and 99%* of the Internet
>resolves
>  to the same IP(s) regardless of who I ask.  But then the other 1%*, and
>  this would likely be larger players who are diversified and have systems
>  in multiple locations and networks, do something funky and give a
>  different address depending on where your DNS server is in the network.
>
>  Then throw in the possibility that YOUR DNS servers are anycasted for
>  great justice, or at least for good reliability.  Now when you base YOUR
>  answer on the caching server's IP address, well, it may not make sense.
>  It seems that Tiggee and OpenDNS are anycasted, as is DNS Advantage, as
>  well as some root nameservers.
>
>  Thus my problem -- because I ask two free resolving name services, which
>  I believe to be anycasted, where to go, I get routed to Amsterdam instead
>  of a few miles down the road in Ashburn, VA, and spend 100ms instead of
>  10ms travelling the globe, costing someone more money for Atlantic Ocean
>  transit when it was unnecessary.
>
>  SO.  Who's problem is this to fix?  Is it:
>
>     1. Me?  Am I a dope for using a very reliable but anycasted resolving
>        name service?  Clearly, I could just use the handy dandy easy to
>        remember because I worked there 198.6.1.x, or is that an Internet
>        faux pas because technically I wasn't given permission to use it?
>
>     2. Google?  They probably have an interest in making sure my
experience
>        to their services are fast and as close to me as possible, but I'm
>        probably a minority and not worth the effort of refactoring a giant
>        DNS implementation just to fix my one problem, nay, inconvenience.
>
>     3. Anycasted DNS Providers? Not sure how they could fix it, other than
>        flag certain domains as special, and do something special for them,
>        but man that smells like a hack.
>
>     4. My ISP?  Does the ISP have to gripe at Google for providing bad
>        results that causes traffic to go over expensive lines when it
could
>        have easily gone locally and much more cheaply?  I'm assuming that
>        sending my traffic over the Atlantic to the Netherlands costs
>        SOMEONE more money than if I had gone to a datacenter nearby, both
>        physically and network-wise.
>
>     5. Nobody?  Is it just the price the customer (me, who helps generate
>        income for Google by using Google and clicking AdWords ads all day)
>        pays for the reliability, redundancy and fault tolerance that
Google
>        has implemented?
>
>  I think things are working as implemented -- it's not "broken," but it
>  seems it could be better.  Then again, sometimes better is more expensive
>  than the status quo, either in time or money or both.
>
>  NOTE: I do not admit to knowing that 100% of what I've written is fact,
>  and if you know better than I, please correct me and show me the light.
>
>  * Numbers have no basis, just a guess.
>
>Beckman
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
>beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------