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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

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blowski·

For the less technically able amongst us, how does this work?

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Two Cisco 1841's running many vrfs bouncing packets back and forth. Source: I did it.

Neat!

Although, I'd have done it differently. using some packet capture tools, fake replies with the various different IP addresses. That way you don't even have to run a physical router that bounces it back and forth.

If you are committed to maintaining it, you might even give it a memorable DNS name. (Though, some of the coolness comes from it just being "out there" in the bowels of the Internets.)

Might I also suggest a Spaceballs sequel. :)

Any practical downsides to this, such as increased latency or increased load on the hardware? It's very interesting and creative nonetheless!

If you have control over a block of IPs, you can set the PTR records to whatever you feel like. Having invalid PTR records will cause headaches for you in a limited set of cases (e.g. sane mail servers won't accept mail from a host which has a PTR record that doesn't have A and PTR records which refer to each other) but outside of that, the owner of the IP block can do essentially whatever they want with the records.

Someone clever decided to have a very long route to a box, and very clever PTR records.

They probably set up a long series of gateways along the route, and added reverse DNS names to match up.

And as likely, it could just be a series of light VMs running on the same host, if not just elaborate masquerading on a bunch of virtual interfaces.

see http://beaglenetworks.net/

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