Re: server redirects by client domain

Matthew James Marnell (marnellm@portia.portia.com)
Wed, 20 Dec 1995 15:54:36 -0500


:> I'm going to float this idea because I thought of it, not necessarily
:> because I have thought it through . . . wouldn't this be the kind of
:> thing it would be nice if DNS could do for you?
:
:I think it would be nice if the DNS has a domain that maps IP addresses
:to lat/long pairs. Then you could see who is close, what taxes you need
:where, and so on. I would think you'd want it similar to the
:in-addr.arpa domain. --Darren
:

I'm sorry to have to post this, but it seems to need to be said.

By mapping to .xx (ISO country codes) or picking which WWW server a client
should point to based on lat/long may be doing more of a disservice to
browsers than a service. There are many International domains that
are choosing .com as opposed to .xx. As for lat and long, this is
nearly meaningless and probably will become moreso in the months and
years to come. My favorite example is a shop up the street and me.
Geographically-wise we're not much more than a couple miles apart.
Net-wise we're on opposite ends of the continent.

What people are wanting to do here is finding the closest net-wise
server to the client. This is more a function of routing, ping avg's and
traceroutes than it is a function of locality or domain names.

For this, it might be nice to have a protocol between servers for a
domain to query each other and return to the main server which is
closer to the browser in question and return a redirect to the
client. This could be done in the server's code, via perl scripts,
possibly java.

Matt