Channel9 Content and DNS

I was just reading on story, on slashdot, that stated that if you or I were using OpenDNS or Google DNS, then you might not be getting the nearest content. I switched my DNS to my ISP provided address and the videos *seem* to load better. 

Anyone else want to try it out?

-Josh

The silverlight player 100% sucks. That is about it. Channel9 can do better. Lets just use native video formats. Embed Windows Media Player if on Windows, if on the Mac use HTML 5 (Safari) or embeded Quicktime.

Video buffering and loading has progressed to the point where I just stop watching. The forums have improved greatly, I truly appreciate and enjoy the work done there.

@CKurt:

Maybe buffering isn't the right descriptor, but when I try to skip around in the video, it just sits there.

Happens on both my Mac and my PC. Safari, Firefox, Chrome. Connection speeds certainly should not be an issue.

checkout dns benchmark on http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm it will be more helpful than any subjective testing

@intelman: I'm not an encoder guru, but if you want to be able to perform random seeks, I think the chunks have to be encoded as fragments when stored in the appropriate output. Or that might be something that smooth streaming does for you.

-Josh

@JoshRoss:Either way it should probably not work the way it does currently.

Apparently, this issue boils down to content delivery networks (e.g. Akamai) using the IP address of the DNS requestor to determine the CONTENT requestor's location and then providing a "close" IP address to the requestor for the actual content.

The problem with that methodology is that the end-user's location and the DNS server upstream from the user that actually makes the DNS request against Akamai's DNS servers aren't necessarily geographically (physically or on the network) near each other. An end-user machine's resolver library will almost never, ever make a direct request to Akamai's DNS servers. It will always ask the ISP (or whatver DNS server the machine has configured). How the ISP then resolves it will depend on the ISP's architecture, equipment, routing, and even politics. If I'm a customer for an ISP, and I'm using that ISP's DNS servers, I have no control over how that ISP resolves it from then on. The DNS request that hits Akamai's servers may come from an IP address totally unrelated to my ISP, let alone where I am on the network.

I won't even get into the fact that the robustness of DNS depends on caching at every step of the way and, regardless of where 5000 of an ISP's customer's may actually be, they're likely to all get the same list of IP addresses returned if they all make the request within a short period of time -- most of /those/ requests will never hit Akamai's DNS servers.

TL;DR: Using the IP address of the DNS Requestor to determine the location of the end-user requesting content as a form of either load balancing or fast content delivery is a hack that I would not expect a CDN like Akamai to use. A hobbyist running Wordpress on two Internet connections going into his apartment knows better than that.

EDIT: As I understand, extensions to DNS are currently being proposed and/or being worked on that would pass the content requestor's IP address along the entire DNS resolver chain .. the content delivery network would then know the actual IP address of the content requestor and be able to use that instead of the IP address of the DNS server requesting the IP address which may have absolutely nothing to do with the content requestor's "location." That would definitely make this problem go away if implemented consistently.

When you have to start troubleshooting DNS configuration because a video you have ALREADY CONNECTED TO and are WATCHING is buffering, someone is doing something very wrong. The Domain Name System is not a routing table.