Same alias for hosts in different countries?

Barry Margolin barmar at bbnplanet.com
Mon Feb 7 19:14:15 UTC 2000


In article <x8wn4.20250$3b6.86300 at ozemail.com.au>,
Glen Jarret <gjarret at tyndale.apana.org.au> wrote:
>Is it possible to have web servers in each of several countries, to allow
>for local language and content as well as faster service, but all with the
>same alias so the company only has to advertise one URL? As I understand it,
>if they all have different CNAMEs, but the same alias, then as long as
>they're far enough apart, the nameservers will only recurse enough to get
>one, which will probably be the closest. Since only CNAMEs are meant to be
>used in PTR RRs for reverse lookup, I can't see a problem. (I'm sure there
>must be one, because I've never seen it done.)

No, there's no problem with it.

>I've read much discussion about directing WWW requests to the geographically
>closest server, but nothing proposed would seem to work as there's no way to
>locate the client anyway, and IP addresses don't give that much of a hint.
>As far as I can tell, using BGP would introduce latency as the routers
>compared notes. (although I'm not very familiar with BGP).

This is precisely how Cisco Distributed Directors work.  It takes a second
for the DD to query the routers adjacent to each data center, to find out
how close they are to the client machine based on BGP tables and/or
attempting to ping the client.  If this saves several seconds on the entire
transaction, it's worth it.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.



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