[AusNOG] urlscan.io

[Mark Delany]

On 16Jun17, Damian Guppy allegedly wrote:

> DNS does not provide the sort of intelligence necessary to direct
> requests to the most appropriate server

Huh? A DNS can be as intelligent as it wants to be.

On 16Jun17, Alex Huntington allegedly wrote:

> From what I understand the locality is pulled from the APNIC registration details.

It's very variable. Some GSLBs are quite smart and others are quite
dumb.

I've worked on one that takes transport costs, latency, current
network utilization and server utilization into account before
deciding which server addresses to return (or redirect to). But there
are some that simply use the shortest BGP path to make a decision or
the about 80% accurate geo-IP mapping from sources such as
IP2Location.

In general there's no easy way to know how smart a CDN is simply by
looking at a few samples - such as the one that started this thread.

In the Akamai case they maintain their own geo-IP database (called
Edgescape?) which appears to use registration details amongst other
data as a base but they actively curate this database to make it more
accurate. I'm sure they'll say that geo is just one of many inputs
into the sekret sauce of their CDN.

As you say tho Alex, it's certainly a cool tool.


Mark.