SRV is great if only it were implemented

[Kevin Darcy]

hilgart at my-deja.com wrote:

> I learned about the "experimental" SRV records from Cricket Liu's BIND
> book.  It supports exactly what we are trying to accomplish with Web
> server high availability insofar as suggesting to clients to try other
> Web servers should the main server be unavailable.
>
> But this great feature is worthless unless the Web browsers and proxy
> servers support it, right?  So should we corporate types be requesting
> this support from Microsoft and AOL?  Or is this best handled through
> the W3C?

Speaking as a "corporate type", my take on SRV is that it's a nifty
service-locator mechanism, but as a general load-balancing-and-redundancy
mechanism, it leaves a lot to be desired. Plus the major paradigm shift
at the application level -- mapping services to hosts instead of just
hosts to addresses -- is a bitter pill to swallow.

If you want *real*, honest-to-goodness Dynamic Load Balancing, get a
commercial product that performs it. If you're on a budget, do the old
"configure rrset-orders on all the authoritative servers and lower the
TTLs" trick to achieve an approximation to the real thing (at the expense
of requiring more DNS server maintenance, and generating more DNS traffic
because caching is defeated).

An intermediate solution may be on its way, if I can ever get enough time
to work on it...


- Kevin