*BSD News Article 47291


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!cs.mu.OZ.AU!darrenr
From: darrenr@arbld.unimelb.edu.au (Darren Reed)
Subject: Re: Round Robin DNS??
Message-ID: <darrenr.806161133@ledoux>
Sender: news@cs.mu.OZ.AU (CS-Usenet)
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
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Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 13:38:53 GMT
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sryashur@sprint.uccs.edu (Surf-Kahuna) writes:


>	Ok, here's the concept: You have say, 3 machines all running
>	a web server. (Let's assume your company is *SO* profitable
>	that you actually need all three to handle the load) 

>	The problem: how to effectively ballance out the load of the
>	WWW trffic among all three machines.

>	The solution (at least one of them): a DNS server that
>	alternates between the three IP addresses of the machines
>	everytime it is queried for say, www.mycompany.com. I.e.,
>	The first time the DNS server is queried, it gives the IP
>	address for www1.mycompany.com, the second time it's queried,
>	it gives out the IP address for www2.mycompany.com, etc. etc.

>	Benefits: Balanced load among all web servers; you could
>	actually (rather cheaply) maintain a LARGE web site with just
>	Pentiums all doing the round robin DNS. Also, since not every
>	DNS query is getting the same address, eventually different
>	sections of the Internet will have a different IP address
>	for www.mycompany.com, which would also help to balance out
>	the load on the machines.

>	This is not new stuff; MSN is already doing it, and pretty
>	effectively.

>	Now, how can WE benefit from this? or more importantly, how
>	can named be modified to do this??

BIND 4.9 has been doing it for quite some time - at least 12-18 months.
Probably longer.

If FreeBSD's named isn't doing it, it is probably because it hasn't been
upated since then.  Look for BIND-4.9.3-BETA* on ftp.uu.net or elsewhere
and you'll be able to do it.

darren