Subject: [dnsext] DNS in the Wild: Your Help is needed

From: Bernhard Ager <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2010 17:40:36 +0100

Dear IETF DNS Extensions working group members,

Today, the end-user experience and the performance of more and more
applications depend not only on the responsiveness of DNS, but also
the exact answer returned by the queried DNS resolver, e.g., for
Content Distribution Networks (CDN) and mirror selection. In this
context extensions to the DNS protocol have been suggested, e.g.,
draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip or the upcoming client-subnet draft.

We aim to understand how DNS works in the wild, i.e., as experienced
by end users. First results of our research have been recently
published at ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in
Melbourne, Australia:

http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/papers/AMSU-CDRW-10.pdf

To better understand DNS and its performance, we would like to scale
up the experiments and for this we are seeking your help. If you are
willing to participate in this effort, please go to the following
link:

http://www.fg-inet.de

Download the script that can be found in the download section of the
website, and run it from an Internet connection provided by a
commercial ISP, e.g., at home.

The typical duration of the experiment is around six hours. All major
operating systems are supported (Linux, Mac OS, Windows etc.). Once
the experiment is done, please upload the traces on our website:

http://www.fg-inet.de/upload.php

Our script performs DNS queries for a number of predefined hosts. This
list is included in plain text in the download packages. The traces
collected with our program do not interact with any of your browsing
or download history or activity. The additional bandwidth consumption
and CPU load due to the experiment are negligible. The traces
collected on this website will be kept confidential within the project
and will not be distributed to any third party, nor shared with any
third party. You also have the option to make them accessible to the
research community if you wish so.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you face any problems in
downloading or running the program.

Thank you for your participation,

Bernhard Ager, Wolfgang Muehlbauer, Georgios Smaragdakis, Steve Uhlig.
email: [email-masked]

-- 
Technische Universität Berlin
An-Institut Deutsche Telekom Laboratories
FG INET, Research Group Anja Feldmann
Sekr. TEL 4
Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7
D-10587 Berlin