Hi all, Does anyone know if there is a method I can use to influence which Akamai cabinet serves up content to our networks? I have had a bit of a hunt on the Akamai site and I seem to be getting lost in sales pitches for hosting for my content. Currently there are at least five Akamai caches that are only one AS hop away from us but we consistently get directed to the most expensive one with the worst latency for us and our user base. I'd hope that there was something less ugly than putting in forwarders for "akamai.net" to dns servers that give an answer that I like. Cheers, -- Lincoln Reid Head of Networks ACSData - AS18119 lincoln(a)acsdata.co.nz Phone: +64 4 939 2200 Fax: +64 4 939 2201
On 2010-05-18, at 22:28, Lincoln Reid wrote:
Does anyone know if there is a method I can use to influence which Akamai cabinet serves up content to our networks?
Yes, find Patrick Gilmore and buy him a beer. I will see if I can tempt him over to this list on that basis (assuming he's not already here). Joe
On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 15:51 -0400, Joe Abley wrote:
On 2010-05-18, at 22:28, Lincoln Reid wrote:
Does anyone know if there is a method I can use to influence which Akamai cabinet serves up content to our networks?
Yes, find Patrick Gilmore and buy him a beer. I will see if I can tempt him over to this list on that basis (assuming he's not already here).
The private responses I have had indicate that a bunch of providers that are too small to have their own cache are using DNS forwards to select more favorable caches, so hearing from someone at Akamai would probably help out more than just me. Cheers, -- Lincoln Reid Head of Networks ACSData - AS18119 lincoln(a)acsdata.co.nz Phone: +64 4 939 2200 Fax: +64 4 939 2201
Careful about using remote DNS caches. Sometimes remote content distribution services won't serve up content to users when there is a content device much closer. I commonly have this issue with large clients who are in multiple countries. Typically they use Microsoft's AD, and although a country has a local Internet gateway the name resolution is sometimes all done out of one country. The results being some of the countries can't get to the websites of some pretty major companies. I have a classic example that happens to me regularly. I have a client in the UK. If I VPN into their site, so I am using their DNS servers but my local Internet connection, I can't get to some sections of Microsoft's web site. -----Original Message----- From: nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz] On Behalf Of Lincoln Reid Sent: Wednesday, 19 May 2010 2:28 p.m. To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: [nznog] Akamai cache selection Hi all, Does anyone know if there is a method I can use to influence which Akamai cabinet serves up content to our networks? I have had a bit of a hunt on the Akamai site and I seem to be getting lost in sales pitches for hosting for my content. Currently there are at least five Akamai caches that are only one AS hop away from us but we consistently get directed to the most expensive one with the worst latency for us and our user base. I'd hope that there was something less ugly than putting in forwarders for "akamai.net" to dns servers that give an answer that I like. Cheers, -- Lincoln Reid Head of Networks ACSData - AS18119 lincoln(a)acsdata.co.nz Phone: +64 4 939 2200 Fax: +64 4 939 2201 _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog
On 20/05/10 08:01, Philip D'Ath wrote:
Careful about using remote DNS caches. Sometimes remote content distribution services won't serve up content to users when there is a content device much closer. I commonly have this issue with large clients who are in multiple countries. Typically they use Microsoft's AD, and although a country has a local Internet gateway the name resolution is sometimes all done out of one country. The results being some of the countries can't get to the websites of some pretty major companies. I have a classic example that happens to me regularly. I have a client in the UK. If I VPN into their site, so I am using their DNS servers but my local Internet connection, I can't get to some sections of Microsoft's web site.
Even simpler - end user who churns their DSL from Xtra to another ISP, but leaves either alien/terminator or dnsc1&2 as dns servers. Then Akamai hosted stuff starts acting very odd - some of xtra's akamai caches are either not accessible or are really slow from elsewhere. OpenDNS also has this effect, and I'd suspect Google's DNS servers do too. -- CF http://criggie.dyndns.org/
On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 20:01 +0000, Philip D'Ath wrote:
I have a classic example that happens to me regularly. I have a client in the UK. If I VPN into their site, so I am using their DNS servers but my local Internet connection, I can't get to some sections of Microsoft's web site.
Is this just a mismatch between a cache which has a defined customer base ( something like "Everyone peered at $IX", or "Customers of $TELCO" ) and having the dns request come from within that scope, but then the actual request coming from somewhere else? So the failure is due to the cache only having access to a small local routing table and no transit to get back to your network. Luckily our transit ( really paid peering grumble, grumble ) services with two large .nz telco's probably put us in the customer category with them, so in theory at least we shouldn't have trouble using either of their caches. Also I would expect that if CallPlus are advertising the prefix for their Akamai cache to APE, then the cache should at least have access to our advertisements at APE for traffic in the other direction. Overall, the DNS forwarding thing seems like something that will cause pain at some point, so it would be great to be able to do something cleaner. Cheers, -- Lincoln Reid Head of Networks ACSData - AS18119 lincoln(a)acsdata.co.nz Phone: +64 4 939 2200 Fax: +64 4 939 2201
participants (4)
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criggieï¼ criggie.dyndns.org -
Joe Abley -
Lincoln Reid -
Philip D'Ath