Re: [dhcwg] draft-ietf-dhc-dhcpv6-opt-netboot-05 - how to proceed?

[Chuck Anderson <cra at WPI.EDU>]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 01:03:34AM -0700, Ted Lemon wrote:
> On Oct 19, 2009, at 12:29 AM, Niall.oReilly+lists at ucd.ie wrote:
>> 	Don't you mean load scattering (rather than balancing),
>> 	or am I missing something?
>
> Try looking up the A record on a name with three different A records,  
> three different times, and notice how the ordering changes.

The ordering rotation isn't guaranteed.  If there is some standard out 
there that specifies this behavior, I'd love to know what it is.  
There was some recent controversy over this idea of relying on the 
ordering of DNS answers for load balancing (or scattering) purposes in 
the context of RFC3484 and Linux's glibc:

http://people.redhat.com/drepper/linux-rfc3484.html

getaddrinfo() doesn't maintain the DNS server's ordering of answers, 
because it needs to sort the results for sane behavior in the face of 
dual-stack servers and source-address selection.