On 2013-09-18, at 04:36, Nathan Ward
Maybe something better would be getting an IANA assigned address for providers to stick on their DNS servers, and everyone can anycast it.
I'm interested in why people think this would be a good idea. Running a caching resolver at an ISP is a twitchy business. There's nothing more likely to make the helpdesk phone ring (or for people to declare your network to be dead, and to take steps to move elsewhere) than a flaky resolver. A resolver service distributed using anycast across multiple/many ISPs seems likely to result in your customers using someone else's resolver infrastructure at least some of the time. Given the tight bond between resolver service quality and customer experience, this seems like an idea with curious business characteristics (unless everybody does it, but that doesn't seem like a particularly low-energy state for the world to be in). Resolvers can be mined extensively and the resulting data streams can be monetised. If you think that's evil, but you're happy for your customers to use someone else's infrastructure, then perhaps you don't think it's that evil. If you don't think it's that evil, sending your customer data to someone else's box so that you can't easily mine it yourself seems equally curious. Servers that I provision have a local resolver bound to localhost, because I don't like the dependency explosion that comes from doing it any other way. Customers get DNS server addresses handed to them in DHCP options or IPCP. I don't see much incentive from that angle to provision a well-known, cross-provider address. Google's success with 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 seem to mainly result from customers getting frustrated with flaky ISP resolvers. If you can afford the operational cost and can provide the dedicated team required to run a resolver service that is supremely reliable, why not use that opex on your own infrastructure rather than propping up your competitors' deficiencies? What am I missing? (Incidentally, if someone *was* to do this, running the idea through the IETF and an IANA Considerations section in order to get addresses assigned seems like the right way only if you are anxious to spend a few years arguing your case in front of a skeptical audience before you find out the answer is no. The more pragmatic approach is for someone with a spare /24 and/or /48 to make local arrangements over a beer for the address to be used to advertise an anycast service, and encourage people to turn up servers with the appropriate config.) Joe