Re: topological closeness....

[dgaudet () hotwired com (Dean Gaudet)]

In article <QQapom01899.199605132105 () rodan UU NET>,
Mike O'Dell <mo () uunet uu net> wrote:
> one other solution (being implemented, I believe), is a DNS server
> that listens to the BGP traffic, so it knows how far away things are,

Another option is to take advantage of the timing information DNS already
keeps track of:

$ORIGIN foobar.com.
www     IN      NS      www1
www     IN      NS      www2
www     IN      NS      www3

Each of those nameservers is actually the webserver... and responds only
with the A record for itself.  Turn down the TTL.  Let DNS caching
take care of the rest...

It doesn't work because, as far as I've seen, the clients (ok, netscape)
doesn't ever requery the DNS.  I'm not sure what state they're at now --
but they're moving towards doing all the resolver work themselves so as
to get multithreaded behaviour.  Maybe we can convince the browser writers
to use ttl.

Dean
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