At 9:57 PM -0400 5/2/02, Rob Austein wrote: >I do claim that there's a difference between letting the client make >the choice of which servers to talk to and having the routing system >decide for the client.
Rob, It's not the routing system "deciding" the choice of servers, it's the human who causes the host routes to be injected into the routing system. Instead of a human putting three DNS server addresses into a DHCP database, a human configures the three DNS servers themselves to advertise the (three different) host routes. The client still gets to choose among them, using whatever criteria it wishes. If, instead of using three unicast addresses, we were to use a single anycast address, that would indeed take away the decision process from the clients. The human who causes the host routes to be injected could, if it were really important, statically prioritize the choice of server by suitable assignment of route metrics (if using an IGP with a big enough metric space). A couple questions, from one who is expert in neither DNS nor DHCP: Do the bulk of DHCP servers today provide more than one DNS server address to each client? If so, do "consumer-level" IP devices (PCs, laptops, PDAs, cell phones, etc.) really make sophisticated choices among those multiple DNS servers, or do they just pick one and then, only if that one fails to respond, try another? Steve -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
