Re: DNS based Destination Selection

[Cedric de Launois <delaunois@info.ucl.ac.be>]

Le jeu 19/06/2003 à 10:50, David Gethings a écrit :
> I do concede that there will be a number of applications that will never
> do a DNS lookup. So this obviously puts a question on whether DNS is the
> right place to do destination selection.
> 
> The point of my suggestion is that it is a simple method of influencing
> which ingress path traffic could take for a multihomed site. It is
> simple enough for most SOHO and SME's to use and does not require much
> networking expertise - much less than using BGP.
> 
> Will it work in every situation: no. Does it offer enough functionality
> that a reasonalbe proportion of multihomed sites will wish to use it: I
> believe so. Is the cost of changing DNS and host stacks worth it: I
> honestly do not know.
> 
> I honestly don't believe we will find just one multihoming solution that
> will suit every multihomed site. I believe this method to a be good
> starting point for people new to multihoming in IPv6.
> 

My question is : what is the goal pursued with this mechanism ?
- If the goal is to perform inbound traffic engineering, then I'd say
  this mechanism is not sufficient. Not enough traffic is controlled via
  this way to get good load-balancing.
- If the goal is just to somewhat improve an external source's
  destination decision making, then what is the advantage of your
  suggestion compared to just carefully ordering the list of addresses
  returned in the DNS reply (solution which doesn't imply any change in
  the hosts) ?