IMHO, off the top of my head, on a weekend where I haven't had enough coffee yet: 3. Anycasted DNS Providers? Not sure how they could fix it, other than flag certain domains as special, and do something special for them, but man that smells like a hack. Anycast is a good thing, but when geo-location style concerns are factored in maybe they should have region-based anycast addresses. Interestingly, with Google there could be another similar concern WRT the IPv6 "trusted tester program" (or whatever the correct name of that is) where the DNS resolver / organization could have sufficient IPv6 connectivity to qualify, but that capability might not expand to the clients of / hosts within the service. /TJ
-----Original Message----- From: Peter Beckman [mailto:beckman@angryox.com] Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 2:51 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: RE: L3: Google from DC via the Netherlands?
On Fri, 6 Feb 2009, Peter Beckman wrote:
I'm OK to that IP as well, but when I query www.google.com, I get multiple IPs, but here are the ones that in in 147:
DNS Server IP Route (for me) 205.234.170.217 (tiggee) 74.125.79.147 Amsterdam 208.67.222.222 (opendns) 64.233.183.147 Amsterdam 4.2.2.1 (verizon) 74.125.19.147 San Jose 198.6.1.3 (uu.net/verizon) 74.125.47.147 Washington DC (yay)
So someone from Google has been helpful in pointing out that the resolver IP, not YOUR IP, is the one that determines where you get routed to when you make a request for www.google.com. Which is simply due to the way things are implemented, which makes sense.
The problem is, here I am, just some guy, and 99%* of the Internet resolves to the same IP(s) regardless of who I ask. But then the other 1%*, and this would likely be larger players who are diversified and have systems in multiple locations and networks, do something funky and give a different address depending on where your DNS server is in the network.
Then throw in the possibility that YOUR DNS servers are anycasted for great justice, or at least for good reliability. Now when you base YOUR answer on the caching server's IP address, well, it may not make sense. It seems that Tiggee and OpenDNS are anycasted, as is DNS Advantage, as well as some root nameservers.
Thus my problem -- because I ask two free resolving name services, which I believe to be anycasted, where to go, I get routed to Amsterdam instead of a few miles down the road in Ashburn, VA, and spend 100ms instead of 10ms travelling the globe, costing someone more money for Atlantic Ocean transit when it was unnecessary.
SO. Who's problem is this to fix? Is it:
1. Me? Am I a dope for using a very reliable but anycasted resolving name service? Clearly, I could just use the handy dandy easy to remember because I worked there 198.6.1.x, or is that an Internet faux pas because technically I wasn't given permission to use it?
2. Google? They probably have an interest in making sure my experience to their services are fast and as close to me as possible, but I'm probably a minority and not worth the effort of refactoring a giant DNS implementation just to fix my one problem, nay, inconvenience.
3. Anycasted DNS Providers? Not sure how they could fix it, other than flag certain domains as special, and do something special for them, but man that smells like a hack.
4. My ISP? Does the ISP have to gripe at Google for providing bad results that causes traffic to go over expensive lines when it could have easily gone locally and much more cheaply? I'm assuming that sending my traffic over the Atlantic to the Netherlands costs SOMEONE more money than if I had gone to a datacenter nearby, both physically and network-wise.
5. Nobody? Is it just the price the customer (me, who helps generate income for Google by using Google and clicking AdWords ads all day) pays for the reliability, redundancy and fault tolerance that Google has implemented?
I think things are working as implemented -- it's not "broken," but it seems it could be better. Then again, sometimes better is more expensive than the status quo, either in time or money or both.
NOTE: I do not admit to knowing that 100% of what I've written is fact, and if you know better than I, please correct me and show me the light.
* Numbers have no basis, just a guess.
Beckman --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------