Re: SRV records - when?

[Ted Hardie <hardie@oakthorn.com>]

Daniel writes:
> I've reread your message a few times, and don't see that you've addressed 
> the issue I was concerned about.

I was pointing out that I am concerned about a different use case,
not saying that my use case solved your problem.  Sorry if that was
not clear.

> 
> If a web site uses multiple protocols (HTTP and HTTPS), and needs any given 
> web browser/client to map to exactly ONE host, then SRV is a useless 
> mechanism to achieve this. Note that MANY web sites that include shopping 
> functionality rely on this today. If there's no solution to this with SRV, 
> then I see little incentive for anyone in web services to bother adopting 
> SRV into web clients. The web sites would still have to run stateful 
> balancers to ensure a given client ALWAYS maps to the same server, or else 
> the user's shopping cart could easily be on a server in chicago and when 
> they try to check out, the secure server they get routed to in Miami has no 
> idea of the cart contents.

I understand that many web sites have both http and https but, as you
note, you might still see these as distinct services ("web" and
"secureweb" to use one set of terms).  An application may well make
use of both services (as you have it, one for browsing, one for
buying).  Moving data entered during "browsing/web" into
"buying/secureweb" can be done in a variety of different ways, and
thought it may be convenient for the same machine to be
involved, it certainly isn't the only available architecture.
For those who want to make sure that it is always the same machine,
a stateful balancer might be the best choice.  For those that use
a different architecutre, the SRV record solution might be fine.

			regards,
				Ted Hardie