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Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

it wouldn't have to be a SPoF, you'd just replicate your server and add an additional record, if the client can't reach the first server it failovers (failsover? fails over?) to the next one. I don't think it adds to the complexity too much and it's hardly going to be slow - it'd be much faster than the time it takes to send even the smallest email message.

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Well, if you're looking up a name, for example from a dialer on a mobile device, or navigating through some kind of directory service; are you going to be happy hanging around for a HTTP request (or several)?

DNS was born to do this; it's lightweight, super fast and wonderfully distributed. :)

A fraction of a second delay probably wouldn't be noticeable to the end user - you'd only ever lookup the number when actually making the call. DNS may be distributed but that's part of the problem - you can't just set your address to redirect to another number when you're out on lunch - it'd take too long for the changes to propagate through the system. You wouldn't put email addresses at the DNS level, so why do this?

>A fraction of a second delay probably wouldn't be noticeable to the end user

It is (try it), and retries/outages would be very noticeable. One of the applications I'm particularly interested in is directory services, and as you can imagine browsing through trees is extremely sensitive to responsiveness. Dialing a name should also be near instantaneous.

>DNS may be distributed but that's part of the problem - you can't just set your address to redirect to another number when you're out on lunch

You can (.tel allows you to switch between "profiles").

>it'd take too long for the changes to propagate through the system.

You can set TTLs to whatever you like (60 by default).

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