On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 01:38:34PM +0800, Soh Kam Yung wrote:
> Among the responses to the original posting was this comment.  Does it
> make sense?

not really.

> Keith Brady 5:21pm on Monday, December 20th, 2010 # Reply
> 
> The “somehow uses our DNS routing to determine our location” is
> actually quite straightforward. All major internet services (Akamai
> and Google included) look up the IP address of the querying DNS server

and how do they know that the DNS request is related to my connection?
DNS data is cached. DNS requests should come only one in a while. 
if my dns provider has the DNS in its cache then my DNS request will not
necesarily make it to akamai at all. 

they can make timed guesses, but really i don't see the advantage. ips
even dynamic ones tend to stay in the same local network, so once you
know a networks location then this can be stored.

on the other hand, geolocation is not really interesting for akamai.
what they want to know how close your computer isto theirs network wise.
an answer that can be found with traceroute (traceroute is expensive
however, but it too can be cached)

from my naive perspective, all it takes is a map of the network which
needs to be kept uptodate, but using DNS requests to do that sounds like
a workaround to catch locations that can not be found by more reliable
means.

as far as overloading one specific server goes just because it is near
google, i would think that load balancing should take care of that. if
akamais goal is to provide speedy downloads then i'd expect them to
connect me to a server that is not overloaded, even if that server is a
bit farther away networkwise.

greetings, martin.
-- 
cooperative communication with sTeam      -     caudium, pike, roxen and unix
services:   debugging, programming, training, linux sysadmin, web development
--
pike programmer      working in china                   community.gotpike.org
foresight developer  (open-steam|caudium).org              foresightlinux.org
unix sysadmin        iaeste.at                                     realss.com
Martin Bähr          http://www.iaeste.at/~mbaehr/               is.schon.org

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