

NASA cannot make a simple DNS change - bcardarella
http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/nasadotgov/posts/post_1306860816073.html?x=18#comments

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quesera
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.

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barrybhunter
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)

~~~
farmdawgnation
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.

~~~
quesera
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.

------
mithaler
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?

