[Nanog] Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics [Was: Re: ATT VP: Internet to hit capacity by 2010]

[mmc at internode.com.au (Matthew Moyle-Croft)]

(I know, replying to your own email is sad ...)
> You could probably do this with a variant of DNS.  Use an Anycast 
> address common to everyone to solve the discovery problem.   Client 
> sends a DNS request for a TXT record for, as an example, 
> 148.165.32.217.p2ptopology.org.  The topology box looks at the IP 
> address that the request came from and does some magic based on the 
> requested information and returns a ranking score based on that (maybe 
> 0-255 worse to best) that the client can then use to rank where it 
> downloads from. (might have to run DNS on another port so that normal 
> resolvers don't capture this).
>
> The great thing is that you can use it for other things.
>   
Since this could be dynamic (I'm guessing BGP and other things like SNMP 
feeding the topology box) you could then use it to balance traffic flows 
through your network to avoid congestion on certain links - that's a win 
for everyone.   You could get webbrowsers to look at it when you've got 
multiple A records to chose which one is best for things like Flash 
video etc.

MMC

-- 
Matthew Moyle-Croft - Internode/Agile - Networks
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