kjkoster
03-03-2011, 22:09
Dear All,
Some of your (and my) applications rely on HTTP redirects to work. Please be aware of the implications of using redirects. They cause your browser to do DNS lookups and thus make your application only as solid as your DNS is.
One of my clients experienced that today when the power broke in their data center. A whole room of servers went dark and one of those was the DNS server of that hosting party. I'll spare you the details about lacking spare circuit breakers.
They were left with fully functional servers, but no way to access them. Using the raw IP addresses of the server did not work, because the application used the server's domain name in a redirect. This would cause browsers to do a DNS lookup on the dead DNS server and hence the application to be inaccessible.
If the application had been using the redirects in such a way that the redirects had been using the host name from the original request, this problem would not have been there.
Kees Jan
Some of your (and my) applications rely on HTTP redirects to work. Please be aware of the implications of using redirects. They cause your browser to do DNS lookups and thus make your application only as solid as your DNS is.
One of my clients experienced that today when the power broke in their data center. A whole room of servers went dark and one of those was the DNS server of that hosting party. I'll spare you the details about lacking spare circuit breakers.
They were left with fully functional servers, but no way to access them. Using the raw IP addresses of the server did not work, because the application used the server's domain name in a redirect. This would cause browsers to do a DNS lookup on the dead DNS server and hence the application to be inaccessible.
If the application had been using the redirects in such a way that the redirects had been using the host name from the original request, this problem would not have been there.
Kees Jan