Re: Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?
If this is for http and similar user-accessed (not machine accessed) traffic, you could do what some large manufacturers and shipping companies do: Provide a (relatively) low-bandwidth Select where you are in the world global landing page which then redirects to a different domain/subdomain for each region. This also lets them direct relatively localized content easily. For example, panasonic.com can list items sold mass-market for the US, panasonic.nl for the Netherlands, and panasonic.com.au for Australia. Yes, you may well run into times that a user in the US goes to the .au site because s/he wants to research an .au product that isn't detailed on the US page but this is not the bulk of your traffic (and, if through stats, you find it becomes so, you can work on your design so that it isn't). - Eric On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 11:28 PM, Constantine A. Murenin muren...@gmail.com wrote: 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.
Re: Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?
On 3/21/13, Constantine A. Murenin muren...@gmail.com wrote: Does it sound too complicated and pointy? Yes, it's not exactly trivial, and not as good as BGP, but better than having 300ms latency from a simple round-robin. It sounds like you are asking about Geolocation, when what you really want is latency-based selection. Latency is more complicated, and influenced by factors other than purely Geographic location. Furthermore, distance doesn't work all that well as a measure of latency: it only defines the latency, in the best case scenario for a link between the geo locations. Why not just have the browser send a SYN packet to every IP in the A/ RRSET? Whichever webserver's response to the connection handshake is received first wins (lowest RTT latency); the other two or three connections are just dropped, so there is some minor waste, in exchange for picking the lowest RTT destination. Now another alternative would be for the local network operator to offer some sort of latency lookup service; Based on implementing packet inspection, and gathering statistical information RTT and average throughput and retransmit rates experienced during network users' TCP handshakes to remote prefixes, aggregated at an AS level. So the browser could query the latency lookup service for the hostname, and receive a DNS reply annotated with an estimated historical average latency, drop rate, throughput for the IP prefix inquired about. Or in fact... have the lookup service re-order or filter the query result, so the responses with higher than a certain cutoff latency are placed last in the response, or filtered/deleted from the response, when there are at least 3 better choices. C. -- -JH
Re: Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?
On Mar 20, 2013, at 20:28, Constantine A. Murenin muren...@gmail.com wrote: [...] but what other alternatives could be configured in 5 or 15 minutes? You got a lot of answers telling you to not even try, and I don't know that you can configure any of them in 5 minutes. That being said there are lots of options that might be good enough: - PowerDNS has a Geo backend - http://doc.powerdns.com/html/geo.html - There are various patches for Bind - Gdnsd - https://github.com/blblack/gdnsd - GeoDNS - https://github.com/abh/geodns I use the latter for the www.pool.ntp.org service where it sends users to one of about 4000 local servers (pops) in about 100 countries about 15 billion times a month. Ask
Re: Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?
On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 01:53:49PM -0700, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote: That being said there are lots of options that might be good enough: - PowerDNS has a Geo backend - http://doc.powerdns.com/html/geo.html - There are various patches for Bind - Gdnsd - https://github.com/blblack/gdnsd - GeoDNS - https://github.com/abh/geodns I use the latter for the www.pool.ntp.org service where it sends users to one of about 4000 local servers (pops) in about 100 countries about 15 billion times a month. I haven't done it yet but gdnsd appeared to be the one to use when I tested some stuff out. The idea was to deligate a geo.domainname.com zone to gdnsd and have it perform the GEO DNS lookups. The PowerDNS one, while testing it, gave me problems trying to figure out how to get the geographical data since the readme I was using was out of date and a lot of the information lead to non-existent links etc.
Re: Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?
Wasn't this problem solved by foursquare.com?! /joke -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?
But what I don't understand is why everyone implies that the status quo with round-robin DNS is any better. I don't think anyone believes round robin DNS records is better. It's that attempting to do better requires adding onto or changing standards that must maintain backwards compatibility and thus nearly useless until everyone adopts it, or hack jobs that have hilariously funny failure scenarios that are unavoidable because it comes down to guess work.
Re: Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?
Constantine A. Murenin wrote: Why even stop there: all modern browsers usually know the exact location of the user, often with street-level accuracy. If you think mobile, they don't, especially because often is not at all enough times. Why is there no way to do any of this? Because it is impractical to assume an IP address can be mapped uniquely to a geolocation. Masataka Ohta
