Address Sorting NOT in V8

[Kevin Darcy]

Jim Reid wrote:

> >>>>> "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.

Jim, it works just fine on an intranet where all of the nameservers can
be configured with the same sortlists. As for resolvers being configured
with "wrong" sortlists which interfere with the server sorting, how many
users do you really think are going to be configuring sortlists in their
resolvers anyway?


- Kevin