Mirror Listings Though TXT DNS Records?

Posted by Cliff on Friday March 7, 2003 @11:45AM from the an-interesting-idea dept.

mackman asks: "I was wondering if anyone has ever though about using their DNS servers to provide mirror information? A specially formated TXT-record could easily provide a DNS-cache-friendly mirror listing. A TXT-record would just need a list of servers and paths, or perhaps a more complicated mapping for servers which only mirror a subset of the original site. This would allow for much more flexibility than a basic round-robin A-record scheme. For example, instead of pounding the Red Hat web server to get a mirror listing (or relying on Slashdot posts for that matter), why not do a 'dig -t txt mirrors.redhat.com'? Of course we could build this into download managers like wget."

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Good idea! by root+66 · 2003-03-07 12:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

This is a very nice idea.
But for more usability the record should include the location (country and continent) of each mirror, so your favourite download manager can try the nearest mirrors first.

Another question is how quick such lists would be replicated/cached by your ISP's DNS server...

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