[e2e] Closestnode.com announcement

[Bernard Wong]

We are writing to announce closestnode.com, a free, non-commercial 
service that we have recently deployed for directing clients to servers 
and peers that are close to them.

Closestnode.com can be used for mapping clients to the closest DHT node, 
for selecting a nearby mirror a user can download content from, or for 
finding the closest game server a user can connect to in multiplayer 
online games.

The service is very simple to use:  You register a unique application 
name with us on the web (e.g. mycoolapp) and either link our library 
into your application or run our standalone program along your server 
nodes. Once that is done, any node performing a DNS lookup for 
mycoolapp.closestnode.com will receive the IP address of the the closest 
(lowest latency) node to itself that is currently running the mycoolapp 
application.

Closestnode.com can be used to implement a generic anycast service. It 
supports hosts behind firewalls and NAT boxes. One caveat is that a cold 
lookup with unprimed caches may take up to a few hundred ms, so this 
system is best suited for distributed systems where sessions last a few 
seconds or more.

More information, code and demos are available at 
http://www.closestnode.com. The system is an offshoot of recent research 
at Cornell university, described in the following paper:

      http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/meridian-sigcomm05.pdf

Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Best,
Bernard,
Alex,
Gun.