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I have played with DNS a lot lately, and i have found that some big companies's web sites uses the Akamai NS as the Name Server for thier WWW servers, for example:

$>nslookup
> www.redhat.com
Server:     192.168.43.1
Address:    192.168.43.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.redhat.com  canonical name = www.redhat.com.edgekey.net.
www.redhat.com.edgekey.net  canonical name = www.redhat.com.edgekey.net.globalredir.akadns.net.
www.redhat.com.edgekey.net.globalredir.akadns.net   canonical name = e86.b.**akamaiedge**.net.
Name:   e86.b.**akamaiedge**.net
Address: 2.23.96.112

> www.ynet.co.il
Server:     192.168.43.1
Address:    192.168.43.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.ynet.co.il  canonical name = ynet.co.il.d4p.net.
ynet.co.il.d4p.net  canonical name = a39.g.**akamai**.net.
Name:   a39.g.**akamai**.net
Address: 81.218.31.170

I have looked up at the Akamai website, but couldn't find the exact problem it suppose to solve for its users, but i could understant that it is relate to security (maybe to prevent DDOS attacks).

Is anybody knows what kinds of attacks it suppose to solve ? or maybe i am just wrong and there isn't any relation to security but to outsourcing the DNS management?

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2 Answers

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From what I understand in there, its seems to be a service for optimisation.

It seems to be some kind of Content Delivery Network used to host the same content in different place to deliver it faster to clients around the world.

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4  
It is one of the oldest and largest CDNs. – Hendrik Brummermann♦ Dec 11 '11 at 12:09
They also provide priority/low latency routing. – symcbean Dec 11 '11 at 12:39
I have read the wikipedia article about the CDN, but i couldn't conclude to which server i am actually ping or get web pages from, is it the Akamai server or the company server ? – Hanan N. Dec 11 '11 at 13:31
up vote 2 down vote

Akamai is one of the largest CDN companies in the world. CDN networks makes web sites perform faster by bringing contents closer to web sites visitors, through different technologies.

CDN can shield web sties from surges in traffic whether it was benign traffic (a site hosting a hot video), or malicious when the site is under DDoS attacks. This protection comes from the size/scalability of CDN vs a regular web sites (10000s of servers vs 10s).

For the content web sites want to be served via CDN they will create a CNAME that points to an A record that belongs to the CDN (as the output of nslookup above).

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