Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Mark D Scheibel

Alastair Wolman

John David Dunagan

Arne M Josefsberg

Marcus Gillette

An exemplary method includes booting a computing device, in response to the booting, accessing a file that includes domain names and resolving at least one of the domain names by issuing a request to a server where the resolving occurs as a background process. An exemplary method includes receiving a notice to invalidate client DNS resolver cache information for a domain name, accessing a list of client subscribers to an invalidation service for the domain name and issuing an instruction to the client subscribers to invalidate their respective client DNS resolver cache information for the domain name. An exemplary method includes receiving a request to resolve a domain name, resolving the domain name and transmitting information for the resolved domain name and additional information for at least one other domain name. Other methods, devices and systems are also disclosed.

Client-side management of domain name information

Using client-server session parallelism (CSSP), a client device establishes multiple network communication sessions with different remote servers and requests the same unsegmented data item from each server. Whichever copy of the unsegmented data item is received earliest at the client device is provided to an application. The CSSP software may be part of a network stack, or it may be part of a particular application such as a browser or a media player. The servers are not necessarily CSSP-aware, but when they are, sessions may be load-balanced. CSSP sessions may also be transferred to other CSSP-aware servers in view of server loads, imminent server reboots, or other events. A CSSP client may notify a CSSP server of status information describing session(s) established at the client with other server(s), allowing the server to reallocate bandwidth to other clients when the CSSP client has sufficient alternate data sources.

Client-server session parallelism

An exemplary failover module includes (a) instructions to respond to a connection problem to a host server at an IP address by selecting a different IP address from a cached list of IP addresses for a domain name associated with the host server and (b) instructions to return the selected, different IP address to future name queries where the instructions to respond, the instructions to initiate, and the instructions to return execute at an operating system level of a computing device configurable to connect to at least one of a plurality of host servers. Such a module may include instructions to optionally initiate a connection to a host server at the selected, different IP address. An exemplary failover module may optionally select an IP address based in part on Internet Location Coordinates (ILCs) where the host servers reside in an ILC enhanced Domain Name System (DNS). Other methods, devices and systems are also disclosed.

Failover in an internet location coordinate enhanced domain name system

An exemplary architecture is for an Internet Location Coordinate enhanced Domain Name System (DNS). An exemplary method includes requesting information for a plurality of servers associated with a network domain name of a Domain Name System (DNS) where the information includes information based in part on packets transmitted by each of the plurality of servers to a plurality of network beacons; receiving the requested information from a name server associated with the Domain Name System (DNS); and, based in part on the received information, selecting an optimal server for the network domain name. Other methods, devices and systems are also disclosed.

Internet location coordinate enhanced domain name system

An exemplary method for load balancing includes accessing a range of values for IP addresses associated with a virtual IP address associated with a domain name; selecting, using a local statistical algorithm, a value in the range; and, based at least in part on the selected value, connecting to a remote resource at one of the IP addresses. In such a method, a client can perform local load balancing when connecting to one of many fungible resources 'behind' a virtual IP address. With many such clients, the task of load balancing is distributed as opposed to being centralized at a server farm or cluster. Other methods, devices and systems are also disclosed.

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Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Mark D Scheibel