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altis · 08-06-2006, 14:13

I come from a background in Transputers and distributed computing. There we would make every effort to ensure that, for best performance, frequently accessed data was held locally. We wanted to avoid having the same information dashing back and forth across the network. To me, this seems a natural thing to do. I like diversity and decentralised things.

As I understand it, every NTL customer has the Winnersh DNS as primary and Guildford as secondary. Therefore, everyone's browser will try to access the Winnersh one first unless the transaction times-out and then it will go to Guildford. I don't deny there is a backup but at busy times this could still lead to a single point overload. However, it may be that some customers are configured the other way round - I don't really know.

UBRs can do other things - for instance, they also act as time servers (although my local one isn't very acurate) - but they may well not be capable of DNS - agan, I don't know.

IMHO, if there were a problem cascading DNS servers then there would only be one in the world.

08-06-2006, 14:13	#11
altis Inactive Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Warrington ntl:81304 Altitude: 12m (and falling) Posts: 4,499	Re: Why can't the UBRs do DNS? I come from a background in Transputers and distributed computing. There we would make every effort to ensure that, for best performance, frequently accessed data was held locally. We wanted to avoid having the same information dashing back and forth across the network. To me, this seems a natural thing to do. I like diversity and decentralised things. As I understand it, every NTL customer has the Winnersh DNS as primary and Guildford as secondary. Therefore, everyone's browser will try to access the Winnersh one first unless the transaction times-out and then it will go to Guildford. I don't deny there is a backup but at busy times this could still lead to a single point overload. However, it may be that some customers are configured the other way round - I don't really know. UBRs can do other things - for instance, they also act as time servers (although my local one isn't very acurate) - but they may well not be capable of DNS - agan, I don't know. IMHO, if there were a problem cascading DNS servers then there would only be one in the world.