Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?

Thu Mar 21 03:44:58 UTC 2013

The first hit on Google for "dns geolocation" results in http://backreference.org/2010/02/01/geolocation-aware-dns-with-bind/, or the first hit for "dns geolocation patch" leads you to http://www.caraytech.com/geodns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Constantine A. Murenin [mailto:mureninc at gmail.com] 
Sent: March-20-13 11:28 PM
To: North American Network Operators' Group
Subject: Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?

Dear NANOG@,

Not every operator has the ability to setup their own anycast.

Not every operator is big enough to be paying 25 USD/month for a managed GeoDNS solution, just to get their hands on GeoDNS.  (Hey, for 25$/mo, I might as well have an extra POP or two!)

Why so many years after the concept has been introduced and has been found useful, can one not setup GeoDNS in under 5 minutes on one's own infrastructure, or use GeoDNS from any of the plentiful free or complementary DNS solutions that are offered by providers like he.net, xname.org, linode.com and others?

I'm an NSD3 user and have a POP in Europe and NA, and, frankly, the easiest (and only) solution I see right now is, on both servers, running two copies of `nsd` on distinct sockets, and redirecting incoming DNS traffic through a firewall based on IPv4 /8 address allocation (RIPE and AfriNIC -- to an `nsd` instance with zone files with an `A` record of a POP in Europe; ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC and the rest of /8 allocations -- an `A` record for NA), with zone replication managed through git.  Yeap, it's rough, and quite ugly, and unmaintainable, and will give optimal results only in 80 to 95 per cent of actual cases, and will not benefit from the extra webapp redundancy one otherwise might have had, but what other alternatives could be configured in 5 or 15 minutes?

Any plans to make DNS itself GeoDNS-friendly?

When editing a zone file in `emacs`, why can one not say that one has
3 web servers -- Europe, NA, Asia -- and have the dns infrastructure and/or the web-browser figure out the rest?

Why even stop there:  all modern browsers usually know the exact location of the user, often with street-level accuracy.  It should be possible to say that you have a server in Fremont, CA and Toronto, ON or Beauharnois, QC, and automatically have all East Coast users go to Toronto, and West Coast to Fremont.  Why is there no way to do any of this?

Cheers,
Constantine.