Return to BSD News archive
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 X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #13 References: <3uai48$2bq@lace.Colorado.EDU> Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 13:38:53 GMT Lines: 39 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