On 2013-05-02, at 11:59, Charles Gucker <cgucker@onesc.net> wrote:
That's not entirely true. You can easily do lookup for whoami.akamai.net and it will return the unicast address for the node in question (provided the local resolver is able to do the resolution). This is a frequent lookup that I do when I don't know what actual anycast node I'm using.
Using 8.8.8.8 to tell me about whoami.akamai.net tells me what Akamai authoritative server Google last used to answer that query. If I can rely upon there being an Akamai auth server every place there's a Google 8.8.8.8 server, then that does seem fun and useful for identifying the Google node I'm using. Is that the case? (If I ask 8.8.8.8, which is somewhere 30ms from Toronto, about identity.l.root-servers.org/IN/TXT then the answer I get just now is "Paris, France". L-Root and Google/8.8.8.8 are not colocated. So the usefulness of this technique in general to identify Google nodes depends on deployment assumptions.) Joe