Site finally launched! We're hoping this will be a useful service for other distributed system builders in the community, both in academia or in industry. The main goal of ClosestNode.com is to allow other people to take advantage of the latency benefits in selecting nodes based on the network position of the clients, without having to get their hands dirty in the network location service world.

Simply register with us, and we will provide you with the subdomain yourdomain.closestnode.com. On each of your nodes, either integrate a Meridian instance into your distributed application, or simply run the provided standalone Meridian program as part of the launch script for your application. After telling us the IP address of a few of your nodes, and making sure you've configured Meridian to use your assigned ID, you're ready to go. It's basically as simple as that. When you clients resolve yourdomain.closestnode.com, they will get the IP address of your closest server to them.

Currently, the registration system is not fully automated. Some of the above exchange will be through e-mail. We'll add a more automated way to add and modify your account in the future, but for now, feel free to e-mail me at bwong AT cs DOT cornell DOT edu if you have any questions.

Bernard

August 16, 2005

From preliminary tests, it seems some DNS servers serving corporate or academic clients do not answer DNS requests from remote hosts even for localhost resolution. Fortunately, DNS servers that serve most home users (dialup, DSL, cable) can be externally queried. This means some non-home users may not be seeing benefits from ClosestNode.com with the current Meridian implementation.

However, we found that the majority of DNS servers that refuse to resolve localhost from remote hosts can be pinged. I'll add ICMP ECHO based latency measurements in the next version to work in unison with the existing DNS based latency measurement scheme, which should allow the vast majority of users to benefit from ClosestNode.com. The next version will probably be available by the middle of September.

If the user's DNS server cannot be reached via DNS queries as well as ICMP ECHOs, the user will not be denied service as the DNS server will simply return a random seed node.

Bernard

ICMP ECHO probes support has been added, and our tests show that the vast majority of hosts can now benefit from using ClosestNode.com.

Updating to the new Meridian library is necessary to enable ICMP ECHO support. The new library is available at the Meridian website.

Bernard

We are happy to announce several new users of ClosestNode.com. OCALA is a proxy services that enables legacy systems to take advantage of modern overlays and architectures. Na Kika is a CDN that provides a safe and secure mechanism for enabling edge-side, cooperative computing of dynamic content.

Click on the links to learn more about each system.

Bernard