'Today' considers data retention and IMP

[Richard Clayton]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

In article <a2b6592c0901120234nb912a8bn72009f8f739ddfa3@mail.gmail.com>,
Igor Mozolevsky <igor@hybrid-lab.co.uk> writes

>AFAIK, DNS is not context-aware, 

It can trivially be made so -- and indeed Akamai's entire business model
depends on this happening :)   [and doubtless other Content Distribution
Networks as well, with which I am less familiar]

>so no matter where you type
>'mail.google.com' you will always get a bunch of addresses from the
>same address pool. 

It's far __less__ likely to be the same bunch of addresses for a service
such as this, than for some random www.example.com.  Google may well
wish to load balance on a regional basis -- so that DNS requests from
Europe get given different sets of IP addresses than those from the USA.
There's no way of telling short of experimenting.

>My ping times are ~38ms to them, and their address
>space shows up straight after the LINX hop. 

The 38ms is far more significant than how many layer-3 devices admit
their presence to you...  so yes, you can rule out the server being
hosted in Googleville, WA :)

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1

iQA/AwUBSWsoPpoAxkTY1oPiEQJFRQCg29rqWUo+7l9BnzIhh7qYkFWjA6wAoI1C
jUk7ovwda/LtVNiUlKtbtoh9
=EKS7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----