[Pdns-users] PowerDNS vs UltraDNS??

[Curtis Maurand]

Akamai has made their living doing this for several years.  As soon as 
someone comes up with an alternative, it becomes childsplay to co-locate 
servers all over the place and use a "geo'd" backend database to route 
requests to  the appropriate server.

Curtis


On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, Mark Bergsma wrote:

> Andrew Mulholland wrote:
> 
> >> The only thing there I see that may be interesting is this "Directional
> >> DNS" stuff they talk about. Now a quick google shows that this is their
> >> talk for some type of "use the nearest web server" result returned from
> >> DNS. Now obvisouly I am gonna have to go away and have a look into this
> >> as I have never heard of this being done using dns before. Does anyone
> >> know if it can be done and if so, can PDNS (That magical brilliant piece
> >> of art) do the same thing?
> > 
> > it theoretically should be possible, if you write your own backend to 
> > handle such stuff..
> > 
> > To do it properly, would mean giving the DNS servers a BGP feed, and 
> > writing some kind of algorithm to return result based on the lowest cost 
> > path.
> > This is how I believe the akadns.net stuff works, and also what BBC are 
> > doing with news.bbc.co.uk.
> > 
> > what might be easier, is doing it using one of the geoip type 
> > things...(http://www.maxmind.com/) but might not always return people to 
> > the closest mirror etc.
> 
> Coincidently, we have done exactly that, during the last week. We have 
> written a new backend called 'geobackend', and is currently available 
> via CVS only:
> 
> http://cvs.blitzed.org/geo-dns/
> 
> or
> 
> http://www.blitzed.org/software.phtml
> 
> but it will appear in the main PowerDNS distribution soon.
> 
> It doesn't use geoip, but parses an rbldnsd zonefile containing the 
> required information, such as the one from http://countries.nerd.dk.
> (See the README file in CVS). We've been using it for a week now, and it 
> has been very stable.
> 
> We are still thinking about ideas to improve it (on the geo-dns 
> mailinglist, http://lists.blitzed.org/listinfo/geo ), so please let us 
> about what you think. Returning IPs based on BGP info would be a nice 
> feature, but we currently do not have a BGP session available.
> 
> 

-- 
--
Curtis Maurand
mailto:curtis at maurand.com
http://www.maurand.com