« The instances are named after the IATA airport codes. "ods" is Odessa in the Ukraine, "kbp", Kiev, also in the Ukraine, "ory" is Paris in France etc. The popularity of Ukrainian destinations is a bit surprising. It is stable (the same measure two weeks ago or one month after showed the same phenomenon.) »
« Many of these IP addresses have a PTR record which gives us an indication of the localisation of the instance. For instance, 93.178.205.146 is hostmaster-gw1.odessa.ucomline.net. So, the Ukrainian effect was a real one. There are few RIPE Atlas probes in the Ukraine. Can it be an attraction entirely caused by BGP? Or a misconfiguration? Here is an example seen from Free/Proxad (AS 12322) in Paris (France). NSID returns kbp01.l.root-servers.org »
« Being able to find out which instance of an anycast cloud you use is very important for debugging operational issues. As a side effect, it also allows funny statistics. BGP never guaranteed that you get to the "closest" instance, especially if you use "closest" in the geographical sense. The most popular instances are therefore not always the ones you expect. This assume that the labels returned by the DNS server about itself are correct, which is not always easy to achieve in the very dynamic environment of the Internet. »
20/01/2014 17:27:11 - permalink -
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https://labs.ripe.net/Members/stephane_bortzmeyer/the-many-instances-of-the-l-root-name-server