On Aug 6, 2007, at 1:47 PM, John L wrote:
Why would they ping rather than just sending the query to all of the
NS and see which one answers first? It's an IP round trip either
way.
If you have sites in San Fran, London, and Tokyo, and you launch a
ping from
all 3 and see which one gets there first, you'll *know* the RTT
from each site.
If you just send DNS replies from all 3, you don't have a good way
of telling
which one got to the destination first.
Um, unless I seriously misunderstand the client DNS cache wants to
know which server is closest. So it sends DNS queries to all three
NS at the same time. Then it waits for the answers. Whichever one
answers first is the closest. What am I missing?
The client DNS doesn't know there is more than one server. It
queries for www.$FOO.com, and the authority for $FOO.com replies with
the IP address of the 'closest' web server.
This result could be pre-calculated by all the web servers pinging
the client DNS. It could be done lots of ways, but that is what we
are discussing today.
Owen said it worked well for his customers (in a past life), and he
has operational experience with this. Can anyone give a serious
counter example _from experience_? Or are we just discussing
possibilities?
--
TTFN,
patrick
