Friday, July 31, 2009

Deadwood snapshot: RR rotation now works

Today's Deadwood snapshot has working Resource record rotation.

What's RR rotation?

RR rotation allows DNS to work as a primitive load balancer. If you make a DNS query with Deadwood, and the answer has multiple IPs, Deadwood now rotates the IPs so that the first IP in the list always changes.

This makes it so simple DNS clients that connect to the first IP they see when given a list of IPs over DNS will now get a different first IP each time they do a query.

OK, polish it up (make sure there's no memory leaks or other nasty bugs, allow people to disable it because I do a lot of massaging of strings to rotate the records which eats CPU on a loaded server, etc.) then work on TTL aging.

It can be downloaded here