The only problem that it does not work at all.
Which WWW server is closer to me - one with BGP path
1239 3491 690 1333 (cnn.com)
or one at
1239 1792 (www.cnc.ac.cn)?
The second is in China, for God's sake!
There ain't no such thing as global metrics. The only useful kind of metrics is administrative, and therefore they cannot reflect any real characteristics of paths.
On a global level, how useful would it be to base the decision on whether the client address belongs to the the InterNIC block, APNIC or the european registry ? I can live with exceptions such as an MCI customer in India gets redirected to the north american mirror server instead of the one in Singapore because their address belongs to an InterNIC allocated MCI block. How often do these exceptions happen ? Where can I find the association of address blocks and registries ? We are currently working on mirroring a copule of sites on all major continents. I understand this approach does not optimize routing to the web servers within north america. Sanjay.