NASA cannot make a simple DNS change | Hacker News Reader

NASA cannot make a simple DNS change

blogs.nasa.gov

6 pointsbcardarella6 comments

The editorialized title is a bit presumptuous.

However, nasa.gov DNS looks a bit odd.

Registrar is GoDaddy. I would have assumed that was not possible for .gov domains.

There is no A record for nasa.gov, but a slew of MX records (so the justification isn't in ancient, inflexible mail gateway config).

www.nasa.gov is a CNAME into Akamai (so they know how to do that).

There might be a valid reason why nasa.gov can't be used as the canonical web address, but the blog post explanation doesn't seem reasonable on the surface.

You can't make a CNAME on a naked domain. (well you can, but there are implications, like your MX records not working - so its not going to fly)

So they either need their current DNS servers to be able to internally resolve the A records of the CDN. But it needs a setup that can replicate the geo-replication that otherwise Alamai handles. Possible but not easy.

Or needs a webserver that just performs a redirect. And put its IP in the DNS. technically easy, but its another server to maintain. And at nasa 'level', it wont be a single server. It will multiple servers - probably geographically distributed.

(or they can pay for a service that handles this - which means needs budget)

I feel like providing one or both of these services should be something Akamai can do for them... The web standard of www.foobar.com and foobar.com isn't exactly new by this point.

The unusual part of nasa.gov is that all pages and assets are served by Akamai.. www.nasa.gov CNAMEs to Akamai. I'm sure that's not unheard of, though I've never noticed anyone else doing it.

So for nasa.gov to go to the same servers without the ugly redirect hack, you'd have to set nasa.gov A records to Akamai addresses. That would probably require a bunch of their servers in Anycast'ed address space, syncing content, etc. Non-traditional for Akamai, but not impossible.

I wonder if NASA gets a special deal from Akamai. No one else seems to have this problem, and most people who can afford to pay Akamai can certainly afford the hardware and admin costs to run their own primary web infrastructure.

The least expensive way would definitely be a redirect on nasa.gov to www.nasa.gov. I really don't think this would require multiple servers for volume (a single very small static file), though redundancy would be smart.

They've obviously chosen the "web browsers handle it mostly, we don't have to think about it" option, which is almost as good, requires zero operational support, and is free.

I hadn't thought about the idea of configuring their DNS to return live results of (essentially) proxied Akamai lookups, which would eliminate the problem of hard wiring their A record to IPs under Akamai's control. That's a neat solution, do any of any the major nameserver sw pkgs support it?

I don't get it. Am I supposed to be mad at them for not removing www from their domain? Aren't there more important things to be mad about?

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