On Sat, 29 Dec 2001, Christopher A. Woodfield wrote:
What you're seeing is MS using Akamai's Edgesuite service. Basically, www.microsoft.com CNAMES to www.microsoft.akadns.net, which resolves to the "closest" Akamai server to the source IP on the DNS query. That box caches the content from the *real* www.microsoft.com, and serves it up. Nice concept, and a helluva lot easier to implement on the end user side than FreeFlow, IMHO...
No, I'm pretty sure that this is a third distinct service, not EdteSuite or FreeFlow - I know it as nothing but AkaDNS, it probably has a "real" name - if you traceroute to those servers, you'll see that they're actual Microsoft servers. Look at that, versus, say, www.segway.com, which is on EdgeSuite: www.segway.com. 3600 IN CNAME www.segway.com.edgesuite.net. www.segway.com.edgesuite.net. 21600 IN CNAME a1758.gc.akamai.net. a1758.gc.akamai.net. 20 IN A 209.185.188.10 a1758.gc.akamai.net. 20 IN A 209.185.188.107 Notice it's on edgesuite.net, not akadns.net. Tim Wilde -- Tim Wilde twilde@dyndns.org Systems Administrator Dynamic DNS Network Services http://www.dyndns.org/