Akamai awesomeness and Opendns lameness

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Akamai footprint awesomeness.

My IP address.

sandipb@pluto:~$ wget -O - -q http://www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp;echo
122.167.0.79
sandipb@pluto:~$ host 122.167.0.79
79.0.167.122.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ABTS-KK-Dynamic-079.0.167.122.airtelbroadband.in.

Akamai CDN for downloading Adobe AIR.

sandipb@pluto:~$ host airdownload.adobe.com
airdownload.adobe.com is an alias for airdownload.wip3.adobe.com.
airdownload.wip3.adobe.com is an alias for airdownload.adobe.com.edgesuite.net.
airdownload.adobe.com.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1396.g.akamai.net.
a1396.g.akamai.net has address 203.101.62.10
a1396.g.akamai.net has address 203.101.62.11
sandipb@pluto:~$ host 203.101.62.10
10.62.101.203.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer dsl-KK-static-010.62.101.203.airtelbroadband.in.

I am downloading from a server co-located at my ISP. Industry standard in US, but I feel really great for this to be happening in India. :)

Imagine. Download server in India, three hops, 25 ms away!

sandipb@pluto:~$ mtr -i 10 203.101.62.10
My traceroute [v0.73]
pluto (0.0.0.0) Thu Apr 23 01:41:38 2009
Packets Pings
Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. 192.168.1.1 0.0% 1 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.1 0.0
2. ABTS-KK-Dynamic-001.0.167.122.airtelbroadband.in 0.0% 1 25.4 25.4 25.4 25.4 0.0
3. ABTS-KK-Static-173.32.166.122.airtelbroadband.in 0.0% 1 24.9 24.9 24.9 24.9 0.0
4. ABTS-KK-static-008.32.144.59.airtelbroadband.in 0.0% 1 39.0 39.0 39.0 39.0 0.0
5. dsl-KK-static-010.62.101.203.airtelbroadband.in 0.0% 1 25.0 25.0 25.0 25.0 0.0

    Lesson learnt: OpenDNS hurts all this goodness

Thank goodness, I moved off opendns today. This is what opendns was giving me all this past year that I was using it.

sandipb@pluto:~$ dig @208.67.222.222 airdownload.adobe.com
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
airdownload.adobe.com. 85521 IN CNAME airdownload.wip3.adobe.com.
airdownload.wip3.adobe.com. 218 IN CNAME airdownload.adobe.com.edgesuite.net.
airdownload.adobe.com.edgesuite.net. 20721 IN CNAME a1396.g.akamai.net.
a1396.g.akamai.net. 20 IN A 204.2.160.24
a1396.g.akamai.net. 20 IN A 204.2.160.34



sandipb@pluto:~$ host 204.2.160.24
24.160.2.204.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer a204-2-160-24.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com.
sandipb@pluto:~$ ping -c 1 204.2.160.24
PING 204.2.160.24 (204.2.160.24) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 204.2.160.24: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=259 ms

A download server 260ms and 11 hops away in US.

Using opendns is breaking anything which uses CDN. Now I have used opendns for a while and it is nice at its work. But believe me, we spend more time downloading videos and text than querying DNS, and if you have a DNS cache at home (like djbdns) or even your ISP’s DNS, it works a lot as well.

Bookmark and Share
This entry was posted in tech and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • Ashish SHUKLA

    I always knew it always sucked due to no NXDOMAIN response, but never noticed it fucks up Akamai so badly…lol. Running your caching nameserver (query *root-servers* of ICANN or OpenNIC, directly) is highly recommended, being responsible yourself for any cache poisoning attacks… :)

  • Ashish SHUKLA

    I always knew it always sucked due to no NXDOMAIN response, but never noticed it fucks up Akamai so badly…lol. Running your caching nameserver (query *root-servers* of ICANN or OpenNIC, directly) is highly recommended, being responsible yourself for any cache poisoning attacks… :)

  • http://www.sajalkayan.com/ Sajal Kayan

    I too had the same observation… http://www.sajalkayan.com/in-a-cdnd-world-opend…

    Nowdays almost all sites with any decent traffic use a CDN… even Google has a direct backbone link to all countries… Would appreciate a lot if you could run the script at http://www.sajalkayan.com/dnstest.py and send it to my email address mentioned with the comment… really looking forward to include results from an Indian IP to my benchmarks.

  • Tarun

    Is it OpenDNS lameness or lameness of Geo-DNS based CDNs, which believe you are located in the country where your DNS lives mostly

  • sandipb

    :) Are you saying that the assumption that DNS servers of Internet users are located near the users is unreasonable? Isn't that how the vast majority of the Internet world works?

    OpenDNS is not a bad thing other than the fact that it does break CDNs, but then that by itself ensures that most of the major websites which use CDNs end up giving a bad experience to OpenDNS's users.