But why would they care where the nameserver is? Point 2 would seem to be a little stupid a thing to assume. Also, what happens if, at that moment, the ICMP packet is stuck in a queue for a few ms making the shortest route longer. -- Leigh Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:53:15 EDT, Drew Weaver said:
Is it a fairly normal practice for large companies such as Yahoo! And Mozilla to send icmp/ping packets to DNS servers? If so, why?
Sounds like one of the global-scale load balancers - when you do a (presumably) recursive DNS lookup of one of their hosts, they'll ping the nameserver from several locations and see which one gets an answer the fastest.
Yes, it's a semi-borkken strategy, because it assumes that:
1) ICMP is handled at the same rate as TCP/UDP packets in all the routers involved (so there's no danger of declaring a path "slow" when it really isn't, just becase a router slow-pathed ICMP).
2) That the actual requester of service is reasonably near net-wise to the server handling the end-user's recursive DNS lookup.