[discuss] Interesting article

Tue Jan 14 17:54:38 UTC 2014

Just to be a little bit more precise:

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 06:34:40PM +0100, Vladimir Radunovic wrote:
> stored and accessed from, but there are over 300 servers worldwide
> (http://www.root-servers.org/) which act through anycast service and are
> accessed along with the 13 root zone servers. 

It's not "along with".  Those _are_ the (anycast) name servers.

In the old days, an IP address was associated with one particular
machine on the Internet -- indeed, one interface on one machine.  But
anycast breaks that relationship, such that an IP address effectively
identifies an address for service.  If you connect to that address,
you get what is offered there.

Depending where two people are are on the network when they connect to
that anycast address, they might each go to a physically different
machine.  Note that this is network-topologically "where", not
geographically.  You'll get to a server that the routing system thinks
is close in network terms, not a server that is in close physical
proximity to you.  These usually are correlated, but not always.

With anycast, the administrative control over a root name server might
reside in the US.  The service itself is distributed all over the
world.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com