geo-targeted dns

[Brad Knowles]

At 12:42 PM -0700 2005-08-05, Jason Morehouse wrote:

>  We have a server in New Zealand and a server in Texas.  We would like
>  users within NZ to be sent to the NZ server, and users in the US to be
>  sent to the US server (more countries & servers to come).  We'd like
>  this to be transparent as possible, using the same url (not www2 etc).

	You're talking about Geographic Server Load Balancing -- GSLB. 
This is totally outside the purview of BIND, and not something we can 
help you with.  Personally, I am violently opposed to every single 
GSLB implementation I've ever seen, but obviously not everyone agrees.

	If you want to try a different tack on this problem, by solving 
this within the routing layer instead of trying to hack on a bogus 
solution at the nameserver, try using the same "anycast" method that 
ISC uses for the root nameserver they operate, f.root-servers.org. 
ISC has Tech Notes available at <http://www.isc.org/pubs/tn/>, and 
the two you want to pay most attention to are at 
<http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/pubs/tn/index.pl?tn=isc-tn-2003-1.html> 
and 
<http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/pubs/tn/index.pl?tn=isc-tn-2004-1.html>.

>  I guess the question is, is there a way to script zone queries?  If I
>  could get it into a perl script, or something to the like, we may be in
>  business --  of course I could be missing something completely.

	If you're bound-and-determined to do GSLB, you'll have to use a 
totally different nameserver.  Vendors make some really big bucks 
selling these devices to large companies, in part because there are 
some fairly hard problems to solve that most people can't even 
conceive of.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.