Any network engineers with anycast experience?

[nmarley]

I've been a professional software developer for the last 10+ years now, but unfortunately I only know the absolute basics about networking. I'm not a networking guy at all. I've picked up books here and there, but I can't even tell you what a network mask does.

But apparently some ideas that I had regarding domains and geographic proximity to the client can be set up with anycast.

I'm wondering if it would be possible, for example, to setup something like "insight.dash.org" where there are several Insight nodes running around the world, and all requests to that domain would return the closest server to the person, or a CNAME alias to the closest, something like that. But someone could still type, say "sg.insight.dash.org" to connect directly to the server hosted in Singapore.

Is something like that possible? Would it require hosting your own DNS? All the domains and server locations are just a theoretical example. I'm wondering if this is possible to setup and if so, what the effort required would be.

 

[crowning]

Without directly answering your question (no time right now) one disadvatange of anycast is that it would allow governments to place highly responsive malicious nodes 'around' your nodes and take over your tasks.
Of course they could do that with DNS as well, but in this case you (as a peer) could still use a trusted DNS-server outside your country.

 

[nmarley]

Without directly answering your question (no time right now) one disadvatange of anycast is that it would allow governments to place highly responsive malicious nodes 'around' your nodes and take over your tasks.
Of course they could do that with DNS as well, but in this case you (as a peer) could still use a trusted DNS-server outside your country.

Ok. I had no idea that was possible. Could a DNS load balancer (maybe the wrong term) work instead, maybe in conjunction with something like DNSSEC to prevent gov't hi-jacking of DNS?

 

[dutchn0mad]

I've been a professional software developer for the last 10+ years now, but unfortunately I only know the absolute basics about networking. I'm not a networking guy at all. I've picked up books here and there, but I can't even tell you what a network mask does.

But apparently some ideas that I had regarding domains and geographic proximity to the client can be set up with anycast.

I'm wondering if it would be possible, for example, to setup something like "insight.dash.org" where there are several Insight nodes running around the world, and all requests to that domain would return the closest server to the person, or a CNAME alias to the closest, something like that. But someone could still type, say "sg.insight.dash.org" to connect directly to the server hosted in Singapore.

Is something like that possible? Would it require hosting your own DNS? All the domains and server locations are just a theoretical example. I'm wondering if this is possible to setup and if so, what the effort required would be.

Perhaps a service like Route53 @ Amazon AWS could help you out.

There is also STUN that is used with VoIP, perhaps this can be used. Emercoin uses STUN as well to find a certain server

http://emercoin.com/RFC5389_STUN
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page_id=109

Pieter