On Tue, 2010-07-13 at 19:34 -0400, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
Well, I'm still busy, but sometimes things have to make it to the top of the stack whether you are busy or not. Besides, World Cup is over, so I am a little less busy. (Or at least that's what I keep telling myself. :)
Thanks for the reply.
But instead of answering a 6-week-old question, I prefer to just start fresh. So.... What would you like to know?
I was one of the original posters in the thread a while back. I am a network engineer for a small provider (AS18119). We build the tricky bits for a bunch of corporates and other business organisations, often we sell transit to them as part of their solution. My question is, is there a method I can use to influence which Akamai cabinet serves up content to our networks and downstream networks? I'll try to explain the background behind this which I suspect maybe unique to NZ, or may be common with some other countries. I think alot of the smaller ISPs in the country will be in a similar boat to us. We have free peering with most networks within New Zealand. We have paid peering circuits ( at something like $150 / mbps ) with two larger NZ telco's. And finally we have multiple paid transit services with other international providers ( at something like $250 / mbps ). The situation we have currently is that the default Akamai instance we get given when we make a request is over one of the most expensive circuits for us and it is outside the country. Both of the larger NZ telco's have their own Akamai cabinets, that with ( some slightly distasteful ) dns hackery we can use, and appear to work well with lower latency and at a lower cost. Also one of the NZ ISP's that we have free peering with ( Callplus ) have their own Akamai instance that we can access at zero cost and has the best latency. Ideally, we would like to use that one when ever possible. I had a bunch of feedback from my original query from network folk that were whacking in forwarders to other peoples DNS servers to use their local caches to pick better ( either $ or ms ) circuits for them. I'm sure that there will be side effects from this at times, but the trade off is worth it for them. Cheers, -- Lincoln Reid Head of Networks ACSData - AS18119 lincoln(a)acsdata.co.nz Phone: +64 4 939 2200 Fax: +64 4 939 2201