The hostnames of my home machine and my colocated machine both end in .net - but I still see google.co.nz, not google.com :) I suppose most people who are plain old ISP customers will have .nz hostnames, but there'll be others who dont... especially anyone who has their own domain name (we all know that .com's are generally cheaper than .nz's - I know a few of my clients have realised the same.) - and the ability to get their own DNS set up.

I know that I've given the idea some thought in the past. For a service provider that differentiates billing based on traffics geographical source/destination (eg, in New Zealand, whether traffic is domestic or international), one would expect that reasonable care would be taken to ensure that any address databases or lists would be accurate and well-maintained. The only thing I can suggest as being nearly accurate or up-to-date enough would be periodic analysis of routing tables. For example: if a route is learned from a particular peer, that prefix must be located in a certain area. You'd need to be sure of certain things, though. You'd have to be peering both locally and outside the country, or buying transit from a peer that feeds international and domestic routes separately. Or you might have some luck persuading a peer to tag locally-learned routes with a given community. If you happened to peer via APE/WIX, you could assume that you'd only be learning NZ routes there. You'd also have to be prepared for the inevitable mistakes whenever a route leaks where it shouldn't. And if you didn't peer with anyone, you'd have even more problems :-) I don't think it would work very well if we didn't have so few pipes into New Zealand. But I imagine that Google would peer with enough providers in enough places to make a pretty accurate guess as to which country a host is located. Anyway. I know that some providers use Packeteer-type systems to differentiate between local and international traffic: perhaps they would be willing to comment how they make the distinction? (I don't know anything about them myself - I expect they judge based on which circuit a packet enters or leaves by and don't take much notice of the actual address of the remote host (?) - actual analysis of source/destination probably isn't necessary.)

At 01:23 7/06/02 -0500, Andy Gardner wrote:

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At 5:52 PM +1200 6/7/02, Chris Hellberg wrote:

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It will work most of the time, but those few who do have .com reverse lookups will fail.

What NZ ISP's have named their dial-up hostnames as .com instead of *.nz ?

I guess it's not as bad as the UK.

-- Regards, Thomas Salmen Network Manager Radionet Ltd. 72 Paul Matthews Road Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Ph: +64 9 4140 300 - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog