On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Bill Woodcock wrote:
> During the boom times, ISPs couldn't individually configure millions > of DNS clients. They generally told subscribers to use two statically > configured name servers.
Many of them, like us, tell subscribers to use two statically configured _service addresses_ which describe the internal-DNS _service_, and are resident on all customer-facing DNS servers throughout our infrastructure.
Some ISPs do this, its fairly easy to check. It is one of several methods an ISP could use. Is there a paper, book, etc which we could give to ISPs documenting such practices? Or do you have to hire the right consultant, who knows the proper incantation? If you look at some of largest consumer ISPs which outsource much of their infrastructure, they don't have customer-facing servers distributed throughout their infrastructure. Or they distribute customers among the servers using a very unusual algorithm. I'm using Mindspring/Earthlink tonight, and my DNS resolver is using a server in Dallas (if you believe the in-addr.arpa traceroute). Earthlink could intercept the DNS/UDP packets to port 53 and route them differently, but I don't think that's true. Tracing route to ns1.mindspring.com [207.69.188.185] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 98 ms 88 ms 94 ms arc-6a.oak.mindspring.net [209.86.81.157] 2 95 ms 99 ms 99 ms cisco-g4-0-0.oak.mindspring.net [209.86.81.129] 3 110 ms 103 ms 104 ms cisco-s6-1-0.lax.mindspring.net [207.69.144.34] 4 105 ms 103 ms 104 ms cisco-1-s5-0-1.pas.mindspring.net [209.86.67.10] 5 130 ms 114 ms 119 ms cisco-s1-1-0.phx2.mindspring.net [209.86.67.13] 6 150 ms 159 ms 148 ms cisco-s3-1-1.dal.mindspring.net [209.86.66.173] 7 150 ms 149 ms 149 ms cisco-6-s2-0-0.dal2.mindspring.net [209.86.67.26] 8 150 ms 154 ms 155 ms foundry-5-ve4.dal2.mindspring.net [207.69.217.227] 9 160 ms 154 ms 153 ms ns1.mindspring.com [207.69.188.185] ATT Worldnet appears to have more DNS caching name servers spread around the country, but I get assigned servers in Missouri and DC when I dial into a California POP. The RTT matches a coast to coast trip.