resolving differently depending on location?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <dj0nh1$13c$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 Sid Shapiro <sid_shapiro at bio-rad.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> In a global intranet, some of my people would like to have connections 
> made to "close" servers. That is you ask for a connection to, say, 
> local.company.com and you get connected to a server which is closer to you 
> depending on where you are. 
> 
> When I was asked this, my first reaction was that this was a misuse of 
> DNS, but then I remembered that other places - ebay, or google have 
> geographically placed servers and connections are made to the "closest" 
> server to you.
> 
> Is this done in DNS or is it handled by the web (or whatever) 
> applications?

Both ways.  It can be done in DNS using custom DNS servers (e.g. Cisco 
Distributed Director) -- BIND doesn't have any support for this.

It can also be handled by web applications, using HTTP's redirect 
mechanism.  So if you go to www.somewhere.com, it could redirect you to 
us.somewhere.com, uk.somewhere.com, etc.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***