Address Sorting NOT in V8

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Craig" == craigjca  <craigjca at my-deja.com> writes:

    Craig> No, sortlists are not what I really want.  What I really
    Craig> want is the feature the developers of BIND 8 conveniently
    Craig> left out (see paragraph 3 on page 240 of the 3rd edition
    Craig> O'Reilly book).  This was such an elegant load balancing
    Craig> solution for a mid-sized site.  I have four 1024 node
    Craig> "subnets", and I'd connect my servers to each of them, call
    Craig> them all the same thing (along with an alias, for good
    Craig> measure), and with DNS 4.94, all the clients on netA got
    Craig> serverA, clients on netB got serverB, etc.
    Craig> Why, oh why, did they take this out?

Because relying on the order that the resource records in an answer
from a name server being in a specific order was generally not a
particularly smart thing to do. Think round-robin DNS for instance. Or
resolvers that "sort" the addresses in an answer. Or resolvers that
get one order of the RRset when they query one name server for some
name but a different order if they query another name server for the
self-same name. Or the name server forwards a query to some other name
server that returns an answer that's optimised for the server that
forwarded the query, not the original host that made it, etc, etc.