At 08:25 PM 3/31/01 -0400, A.M. Holm wrote:
>Why would the mail servers be located in New York while
>another element (???) of the service/organization be
>headquartered in Toronto, home of the hapless Holmes boys?
>Is this a common practice or simply yet another instance
>of the quirks in this company?
That's pretty standard procedure, A.M. What one wants is a
distributed architecture, especially in the locating of the
nameservers, so that if one part of the network is knocked out for
some reason (fibers got cut, network outage, etc.) the other
server(s) can take up the slack and ensure that service is
uninterrupted.
(This is what the Microsofties got dinged on when hackers ran a DOS
attack and took out all three of their nameservers, which turned out
to be located in the same segment of their network. They were putting
all of their nameserver eggs in one basket, so to speak. Makes you
shake your head and wonder how Microsoft can get to where they are
and still make that dilbertesque network architecture mistake. But I
digress....)
In the case of crosswinds, I surmise that GLOBIX.NET in New York is
their upstream provider, hence the nameserver located in New York.
It's not that GLOBIX.NET provides crosswinds with a dedicated box to
be named ns2.crosswinds.net, rather it's just a case of aliasing
their main nameserver to all of their client domains.
And they apparently run their own nameserver on their local box in
Toronto.
Strictly on the network architecture front, I'd give crosswinds a
passing grade for distributing their nameservers. Which is better
than the Microsofties would get before getting a hard-knock lesson
from the blackhats.
Duc
