nanog mailing list archives
Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover
From: Paul Vixie <vixie () vix com>
Date: 06 Oct 2001 20:40:47 -0700
There obviously is a need for an 'official' method to do global load balancing using DNS.
Ouch! No, there isn't. Not "obvious" to me, that is.
Let's face it, people are doing it now on a not so large scale but that is rapidly changing because of the introduction of both hardware and software solutions that (mis)use DNS to overcome it's current limitation.
DNS has no current limitation that is relaxed by making it less coherent. People abuse DNS due to limitations in other parts of the TCP/IP stack, but DNS coherency introduces no problems of this kind on its own behalf.
I'm not very interested in the discussion why this behaviour would be broken. It's for more interesting to talk about improving DNS so that there will be room for things like load balancing or dynamic DNS. In such a way that people will not start screaming when they see TTLs of 30 seconds or non-linear behaviour of load balancers.
If your goal is to arrange for global content mirroring, and binding of content clients to whichever content server will give them the best measured performance for any given transaction, then using DNS qualifies for a "you're digging in the wrong place" award. (You won't find what you're looking for but you will make a hell of a mess everyplace else.) Note that if you'd like to debate fine points of DNS, there's a mailing list (namedroppers () ops ietf org) for it, and that such traffic would be off-topic for this (nanog@) list.
Current thread:
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover, (continued)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover bert hubert (Oct 06)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Paul Vixie (Oct 06)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover bert hubert (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Paul Vixie (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Randy Bush (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Patrick Greenwell (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Peter van Dijk (Oct 06)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Paul Vixie (Oct 06)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Stefan Arentz (Oct 06)
- brainstorms (Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover) E.B. Dreger (Oct 06)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Paul Vixie (Oct 06)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Adam McKenna (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Paul Vixie (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover David Howe (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Paul Vixie (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover David Howe (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Adam McKenna (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Paul Vixie (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Adam McKenna (Oct 07)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover bert hubert (Oct 08)
- Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover Paul Vixie (Oct 08)