Subject: [alto] DNS in the Wild: You Help is needed!!

From: Georgios Smaragdakis <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 11:25:29 +0100 (CET)

Dear IETF ALTO members,

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a fundamental building block of today's 
Internet. Today, the end-user experience and the performance of more and 
more applications depend not only on the responsiveness of DNS, but also 
the exact answer returned by the queried DNS resolver, e.g., for Content 
Distribution Networks (CDN) and mirror selection (case studies of ALTO).

We aim to understand how DNS works in the wild, i.e., as experienced by 
end users. First results of our research have been recently published at 
ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in Melbourne, Australia:

http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/papers/AMSU-CDRW-10.pdf

To better understand DNS and its performance, we would like to scale up 
the experiments and for this we are seeking your help. If you are willing 
to participate in this effort, please go to the following link:

http://www.fg-inet.de

Download the script that can be found in the download section of the 
website, and run it from an Internet connection provided by a commercial 
ISP, e.g., at home.

The typical duration of the experiment is around six hours. All major 
operating systems are supported (Linux, Mac OS, Windows etc.). Once the 
experiment is done, please upload the traces on our website:

http://www.fg-inet.de/upload.php

Our script performs DNS queries for a number of predefined hosts. This 
list is included in plain text in the download packages. The traces 
collected with our program do not interact with any of your browsing or 
download history or activity. The additional bandwidth consumption and CPU 
load due to the experiment are negligible. The traces collected on this 
website will be kept confidential within the project and will not be 
distributed to any third party, nor shared with any third party. You also 
have the option to make them accessible to the research community if you 
wish so.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you face any problems in 
downloading or running the program.

Thank you for your participation,

Bernhard Ager, Wolfgang Muehlbauer, Georgios Smaragdakis, Steve Uhlig.
email: [email-masked]

------------------------------------------
Georgios Smaragdakis,
Senior Research Scientist
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories
Technical University of Berlin
http://www.smaragdakis.net