NS geo-distribution

[Lyle Giese]

On 04/30/13 03:30, Dave Warren wrote:
> On 2013-04-30 00:49, Sten Carlsen wrote:
>> Don't forget that most users will get the address out of "some" 
>> cache, not directly from the authoritative servers.
>
> Absolutely. This is even more true in our case as many of our clients 
> are serve very local areas and 2-3 ISPs and 3-4 mobile providers 
> probably cover 90%+ of their clients.
>
>
> On 2013-04-29 21:48, Chris Buxton wrote:
>> RTT means almost always hitting the fastest server.
>
> My concern with relying on RTT is that since most of our sites are 
> very low volume, will it be effective or does it work better when a 
> host has higher traffic? How long do resolvers remember a particular 
> NS's RTT?
>
> We have a handful of Europe based clients, but their number is quite 
> small, so I'm not sure if we'd be significantly hurting the majority 
> by introducing a high-latency server into the mix or not, or even how 
> to evaluate the results.
>
> I realize I've probably spent more time thinking about it than I'll 
> possibly save anyone else anyway, so perhaps that's my answer.
>
> I appreciate all the input.
>
> -- 
> Dave Warren
> http://www.hireahit.com/
> http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren
>
>
I may be late to the party, but I am just finishing a project to move 
LCR's tertiary name server.  Over the years, I have been amazed at how 
small and quick DNS traffic is.  With caching, it gets even quicker as 
far as the client is concerned.

Even with a few Europe based clients, dns won't be the slow part. And 
after reading some material on dns diversity, I decided to move one of 
my name servers to a hosting company.  I picked a low priced company 
with a virtual machine running OpenSuSE.  Installed NAMED plus the RRL 
patches from source and I was done.  Picked up one IPv4 address and one 
IPv6 address and starting configuring zones.

The virtual runs nothing else and I am paying $20/month(should convert 
to yearly billing and save a couple more bucks).  I am in the Chicago 
area and the virtual machine is in Dallas, TX.  Sounds like excellent 
geo diversity to me.  Plus Texas has it's own power grid.  So we even 
have major power grid separation.

The dns diversity article I found stated that it's better to get the 
right IP address and not be able to get to that IP address than to not 
be able to find any DNS servers for the zone.  Email is handled more 
politely in that respect especially.  Plus I remember that the Internet 
is a best effort network.  There is no guarantied connectivity  on the 
Internet.

Lyle Giese
LCR Computer Services, Inc.

P.S. Maybe you would like to use that box I have for a tertiary server.  
It's got plenty of cpu cycles and extra bandwidth under that hosting 
package!

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