NASA site hosted in India?? or something else?

[thomasantony]

Hey,
I noticed this due to the "Flagfox" firefox extension. It was showing the flag of India when I was browsing NASA.gov. I tried pinging and found that it wouldn't work for some reason. But then it worked when I added the www.

The address resolves to 202.54.157.153 . On WHOIS ing that IP at apnic.net, I found that it is owned by VSNL, a previously government owned, service provider, and one of the providing one of the primary internet gateways here.

Is this outsourcing??
I tried using the site: http://www.hcidata.info/host2ip.cgi

to do the same and got a different IP apparently located in Europe. Is this something to do with funny resolution of .GOV addresses?

~
Thomas

 

[reverend]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies

Excerpt:
Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) is a company that provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1998 by then-MIT graduate student Daniel Lewin, along with MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton and MIT Sloan School of Management students Jonathan Seelig and Preetish Nijhawan. Leighton still serves as Akamai's Chief Scientist, while Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines flight 11 which was crashed in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent.

Akamai transparently mirrors content (usually media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, video) stored on customer servers. Though the domain name is the same, the IP address points to an Akamai server rather than the customer's server. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the user's network location.

 

[thomasantony]

Ok .....

I have seen those akamai links everywhere .. like Yahoo videos, apple trailers .. everywhere .. Guess I thought they were some BIG part of the interwebs and never took any notice of it .

~
Thomas