Concise Guide to DNS and BIND, The

Address Sorting

This is a somewhat arcane subject simply because few people need features related to the address sorting functions in BIND. While address sorting was the default in older versions of BIND 4, newer versions of BIND 4 and BIND 8 use the address round-robin scheme described in Chapter 3 in the section "DNS Round Robin and Load Distribution."

Address sorting in BIND is the process in which, if the host being queried about has several addresses and one address is closer to the client, that address should be returned first. This is based on the theory that using the address closer to the client is more optimal, which it usually is. This, of course, assumes that the client does not hash the answer, parse it backward, or sort it—as it ...