Community DNS
Here’s an interesting project that makes use of a community of BGP-speaking DNS slave servers to do anycast DNS.
Instead of having to run their own geographically distributed servers and deal with administrative matters like colocation and hardware maintenance, Community DNS relies on its members to run slave servers that run on a customized Linux bootable CD.
Upon setup, these slave servers speak BGP with the hosting member’s routers to announce the anycast prefix. Theoretically, this improves the performance of the DNS service by routing queries to the closest DNS server and also providing plenty of redundancy against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
For now though, the quantity and location of servers appear to be rather sparse, with most servers clustered around Western Europe and the usual peering points in the US.
Like peer-to-peer networks, this will only work if there are sufficient well-distributed nodes on the Internet. Given that they don’t seem to have been around for very long, there’s probably still a long way to go (and grow). Till then, let’s see how this works out.
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