North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Localized mail servers, global scope

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Thu Jun 23 14:40:21 2005 
On 2005-06-23, at 10:57, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:


Wild idea and there's just too much good german beer here at MAAWG
(www.maawg.org) in Dusseldorf, but .. anybody tried anycasting a
mailserver?

Operationally that is ...
I know of people who have anycasted the address used by their clients for mail submission using SMTP (so that clients connect to a stable address, and the node which services their request varies according to where they are connecting from).

Like all applications of service distribution using anycast, care is required: e.g. a stable, internal network with a well-known topology, and anycast nodes placed such that node selection by clients is consistent, packet-to-packet, for periods of time far exceeding the expected maximum transaction time.

The places I have seen this done have had POPs connected with expensive and congested links, so keeping mail submission from customers local and snappy was a big win.

I think you're talking about anycasting a server across the Internet to act as a low-numbered MX, though. I haven't met anybody who thought that was a good idea, yet. :-)


Joe