On Sun, Oct 27, 2002, Thom May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * Joshua Slive ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote : > > Pier Fumagalli wrote: > > > > >On 27/10/02 0:54, "David Burry" wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > Right. If we had very reliable mirrors and a good technique for keeping > > them that way, I'd be fine with doing an automatic redirect or fancy DNS > > tricks. But we don't have that at the moment. > > > > >I looked into it back in the days, but the only way would be to go down to > > >RIPE (IANA in the US) to see where that IP is coming from, doing some > > >weirdo > > >WHOIS parsing and stuff... _WAY_ overkilling... Anyhow this is going waaay > > >offtopic! :-) > > > > See: http://maxmind.com/geoip/ > > Or just ask BGP... http://www.supersparrow.org/
Network routes don't necessarily mean that server is "best". Bandwidth varies greatly between different routes as well as server load. Plus, supersparrow is mostly a proof of concept. Dents (the underlying DNS server that I've mostly wrote) is a long way off from being production ready, and the method supersparrow uses doesn't scale well (telnet to a Cisco router). Anyway, it's next to impossible to make a perfect decision about the "best" server to use. IMHO, if you make the decision for the user (by only returning certain servers via DNS, etc) then it should be close to a perfect choice. Otherwise, you may just want to let the user choose themselves by just listing the mirrors and their location and let the user choose. JE
