On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
...
That sounds excellent, but isn't that technically
difficult? ...
...
It's much harder (right?) to identify where a user
is coming from and
route them through the proxy that's best for them. This is what
Akamai and people like this charge big bucks for doing.
Ok. Others have commented on this (and at least one has done some
homework), but as one who has done this sort of thing (*is* doing this
sort of thing) and knows first hand how Akamai's magic works, I'm gonna
unmuddy the waters a bit...
First, difficulty is open to discussion. It's rather simple to configure
"views" within BIND. It becomes a management hassle on the scale being
proposed, but it's still very much doable.
Identifying the physical location of a user will never be 100% accurate.
And technically, it doesn't matter where they *physically* are; the ip
layer path between them and any farm(s) is the only important part. One
can assume IANA address deligations are going to fall within the correct
region. However, we all know this is not always the case. It'll have
to do. (the more accurate alternative(s) are a nightmare of complexity.)
Akamai's foo (and yes, I'm literally wearing an Akamai hat *grin*) is
based mostly on the localized caches. Each ISP hosting a cache has reported
their announced address space to Akamai which is used to aim requests
to the local cache(s). If your IP isn't covered by a local cache, you'll
be aimed to a "close" public cache. For example, if you ask one of BTI's
dns servers for an akadns host, you'll get back a bti address for one of
the cache servers on the edge of their network. (because akamai will see
the request coming from within bti's network.)
===
In short, this can be done. It'll take a bit of tweaking to get a happy
balance. And it'll require some maintenance, but what doesn't around
here :-)
--Ricky
PS: For my money, grab that 16GB beast and beg nforce.nl to host it for us.
It'd make a nice memcache and fileserver.