Are federations servers connected with each other directly?

Question

1. Are federations servers connected with each other directly?
2. How federation servers connect to each other on Stellar network?
3. Can we keep the history on federation server? How?

Answer 1

Stellar federation server is an implementation of Stellar Federation Protocol, which used to map names to addresses and any other info.

It is good practice to deploy federation server if you are Anchor.

It works such way:

1. Got request like this username*anchordomain.com
2. Look for federation server endpoint at https://anchordomain.com/.well-known/stellar.toml at FEDERATION_SERVER setting.
3. Call federation server with query like this: https://federation.anchordomain.com/?q=username&type=name
4. Got response like this: { "stellar_address": "username*anchordomain.com", "account_id": "GBOFXLQPWAHK4R5Z6NXMQYMKSXXYXAM5CVZSRCSTBZANQXWCFFAUFZUY" }

So, next is as usual.

For implementation of Federation server you can use it from stellar/go repo (services/federation) but it is possible to implement it with your own. Of course it is possible to log all queries to analyze data or add any additional logic, but server should be compliant with protocol.

https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/federation.html

Answer 2

1. No.
2. They don't.
3. Can you expand on what kind of history you mean?

Here's an answer I wrote that goes over what federation is and how it is used: https://stellar.stackexchange.com/a/1592/762