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I'm currently running a front-end caching server powered by Varnish. It serves up a few websites. I'm using Bind to serve DNS requests. The first server is located in the Netherlands, where as a new server I just acquired is located in the US. Is it possible to have Bind serve up DNS records for the "closest server"? And is it possible to still have it serve up the IP of the other server as a secondary IP in case the target server crashes?

FHannes
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there's a patch for bind to provide geoip-aware 'split view'. this addresses the first part of your question. unfortunately the http client does not have built in failover capability so the 'serve up the IP of the other server as a secondary IP in case the target server crashes' part will not work. sure you can respond to the A request with 2 ips but then client will round-robin between them. so you should look for another failover [dns with short ttl?].

take a look here or here for examples of using the geoip in bind to provide different answers depending on the geolocation of the ip sending the dns query.

pQd
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  • most clients will just always use the first DNS entry, right? So if you have 4 ips: US1, US2, NL1, NL2... to us people you give US1, US2, NL1, NL2.. for NL people you give NL1, NL2, US1, US2... will mostly get people to use the closer server (but not guaranteed) – bwawok Mar 20 '15 at 16:53