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I'm no expert on DNS, but this struck me: Individuals can also choose to display their location, allowing their contacts to see where they are at any given tim

by mixmax 18y ago

I'm no expert on DNS, but this struck me: Individuals can also choose to display their location, allowing their contacts to see where they are at any given time and opening the door for location-based services. As far as I know DNS takes up to 24 hours to update all nameservers, rendering this service completely useless. Am I wrong on this?

TheBosch 18y ago
Now I could be wrong on this, but I believe that's at the EXTREME end of things, I would say with the way DNS is updated now it usually takes under an hour at most. At least that's my personal experience.
- mixmax 18y ago
  Thanks for clarifying :-) But under an hour still kills the concept of location based services.
  - notauser 18y ago
    Under an hour still works for 'who is in London for dinner tonight'.
iigs 18y ago
Sort of. Depending on where this is actually stored it can be instantaneous -- at work we have a pair of servers that serve DNS via MySQL replication, and time from putting data into the master and seeing it in DNS is well under one second. If they're suggesting you update the .tel TLD servers with your information, the sky's the proverbial limit, but it would be possible for them to keep it pretty tight. The real problem with this is that there's no notion of ACLs or multiple viewports in DNS -- I reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally don't want any spammer who can find me@iigs.tel to be able to spam me with data from GPS me.iigs.tel records.
olefoo 18y ago
You can set the TTL (time to live) of a zone to whatever value you like including zero to force every lookup to go to the authoritative servers (do not do this, it will make your site slow for users and your network administrators grouchy). Most dynamic dns providers have a default of 60 seconds. From the article it's hard to tell exactly what they are talking about, but it sounds like any of a number of schemes for abusing DNS as a federated database.

by mixmax 18y ago

TheBosch 18y ago

Now I could be wrong on this, but I believe that's at the EXTREME end of things, I would say with the way DNS is updated now it usually takes under an hour at most. At least that's my personal experience.

mixmax 18y ago
Thanks for clarifying :-) But under an hour still kills the concept of location based services.
- notauser 18y ago
  Under an hour still works for 'who is in London for dinner tonight'.

iigs 18y ago

Sort of. Depending on where this is actually stored it can be instantaneous -- at work we have a pair of servers that serve DNS via MySQL replication, and time from putting data into the master and seeing it in DNS is well under one second. If they're suggesting you update the .tel TLD servers with your information, the sky's the proverbial limit, but it would be possible for them to keep it pretty tight. The real problem with this is that there's no notion of ACLs or multiple viewports in DNS -- I reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally don't want any spammer who can find me@iigs.tel to be able to spam me with data from GPS me.iigs.tel records.

olefoo 18y ago

You can set the TTL (time to live) of a zone to whatever value you like including zero to force every lookup to go to the authoritative servers (do not do this, it will make your site slow for users and your network administrators grouchy). Most dynamic dns providers have a default of 60 seconds. From the article it's hard to tell exactly what they are talking about, but it sounds like any of a number of schemes for abusing DNS as a federated database.