On 21 Jul 1996, Dean Gaudet wrote:
And heavily used WWW servers are another thing that could benefit from aligning themselves with the topology.
The protocols don't support this cleanly. So far nothing I've seen would allow a single URL to be used to access the "nearest" server.
WWW servers can issue a "redirect" to a different URL. Anybody can hack this up with something like Apache by adding index.cgi to the index page possibilities and then enabling .cgi as an extension to automatically run a CGI script which could issue the redirect in the HTTP headers instead of emitting an HTML document. The CGI script would only need to be a simple table lookup similar to what a Cisco's SSP does. Of course their needs to be something more intelligent (like BGP to continue the analogy) that builds and maintains the lookup table based on some sort of heuristics.
Until something like that exists
It exists right now. Several people are doing this kind of thing. It's just not an off-the-shelf product. Yet.
the topology. Your suggested use of redirects just complicates things -- consider how the URLs would end up looking in a search engine.
Life is never perfect. ;-) Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com