[dns-operations] opting in to stupid DNS tricks

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 09:55:24AM -0500, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
...
> Trying to say I cannot respond with whatever IP address I like when you ask me for a hostname sounds to me like: "I went to www.$FOO.com and they served me a banner ad.  I did not opt-in to that advertising!"
> 


Taking my heart in my hand, I approach this slightly venomous dialogue,
hoping that Patrick will be good enough not to attack me for questioning
him.  And, yes, others used mean language first; but escalation is not
the way to win or even wage a discussion.


In fact, one of my "best practices" list is to have all name servers
serve the same information.  I was thinking of people who hand-enter
changes on all servers, and don't bother with such things as zone
transfers, and inevitably get discrepancies.  I did add an exception for
split DNS.  This points up another exception I should probably add,
since we use devices that I've called "conditional" name servers that
return different IP addresses under different conditions.


> However, just to clear up a few things, CDNs are not the only companies that get geo-localization wrong.  And there is the fact most web page localizations (including all the Akamai ones I've seen) use the client IP address, not the name server IP address.  But please don't let things like facts get in the way of rant against CDNs.
> 


I am curious about how this works.  As I have observed it, I thought
that Akamai returned an IP address of a local mirror.  [At least, one of
their services does.]  In that scenario, the end client's IP address is
never seen: only that of the recursively resolving name server that
queries Akamai.  I could understand it if the Web browser went to a
central Web server that then "permanently" redirected the URL to a
closer server - but that, again, is not how I understood Akamai to work.


--
/*********************************************************************\
**
** Joe Yao				jsdy at tux.org - Joseph S. D. Yao
**
\*********************************************************************/