When I worked for NeoPets in the summer of 2000 they had a server farm about that size. It was behind a NetFoundry (I think) Load Balancer at the time. Perhaps their load balancer died and they had to get back up in a hurry. Thanks, Adam "Tauvix" Debus Linux Certified Professional, Linux Certified Administrator #447641 Network Administrator, ReachONE Internet adam@reachone.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Deepak Jain" <deepak@ai.net> To: "Alex Lambert" <alambert@quickfire.org>; "Stephen Milton" <milton@isomedia.com>; <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 7:40 PM Subject: RE: Odd DNS responses for www.neopets.com
Maybe it's just me, but isn't there something odd about a DNS query coming back with 78 entries for the same host? It sends back an UDP packet that gets truncated and the DNS resolver reverts to TCP to get the full list.
This is often used for server pools (as I'm guessing you know).
It seems to cause problems with Windows clients and/or Windows DNS servers. Seems like overkill.
The 78 addresses listed here are all in one bit of a /24. In the cases I've seen, there are a few servers listed in several different locations, network- (and location-) wise. I agree that this looks really weird. Perhaps they use it as a cheap load balancer?
Perhaps they use it to pad their IP allocations??
DJ