Citylink Ltd. has set up an Anycast I-ROOT domain name system (DNS) server at the Wellington Internet Exchange in New Zealand.

The server, which went live last week, is funded by InternetNZ and was set up with the help of US-based non-profit research institute Packet Clearing House, which supports Internet traffic exchange operations and analysis, and Sweden"s Autonomica AB, which runs the I-ROOT DNS servers.

Anycasting is a technique that helps shorten the query paths through routing protocols so as to keep traffic as local as possible. This in turn reduces network resource usage and helps alleviate the load on busy DNS servers elsewhere.

Currently, there are over 90 anycast server instances in 35 countries supplementing the 13 root servers at the top of the DNS hierarchy. Anycasting makes the root name server system more resilient against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and also increases performance as network load reduces.

The Wellington DNS mirror follows the F-ROOT server set up in Auckland last year, with the help of the Internet Systems Consortium that manages them.