An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS • Hacker News Board

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#11

Post by rlonn » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 7:28 AM UTC

myrandomcomment wrote: post #7

So I have the pleasure of calling Paul a friend. One of the most interesting and insightful things he has said in a conversation about the creation of DNS to me was "if those above me had understood the importance of what we where doing it would have never happened and the project would never have been given to someone like me at my level at the time...". It is not clear he understood it at the time himself. He is a…

> I (a networking geek that just took this cool stuff and built with it) cannot claim to have done anything special on this journey to arrive where we are today

> I struggle to see that level of idealism in today's tech crowd.

I wonder if these two are connected. The people I know who have accomplished things are rarely those who look backwards or are quick to lose faith in others, young or old.

Of course there is idealism out there. Tons of it. The eco system is just seriously bigger now, and the money grabbers get most of the headlines so you have to keep up and know where to look.

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#12

Post by jbverschoor » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 8:30 AM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #3

This was my favorite Q & A: > Tim Berners-Lee [inventor of the World Wide Web] and many others have called the design of the URL clumsy because we have host.domain— welcometothejungle.com—where it’s hierarchically going from lower to higher. And then we have the path component—/en/collections/behindthecode—which goes from higher to lower. We also use a mix of periods and slashes. So Berners-Lee proposed that domain/h…

In the past, many DNS servers were configured so you can execute an "ls" to list the subdomains

Nowadays most have disabled that option.

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#13

Post by tannhaeuser » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 10:18 AM UTC

I'd be interested to know what he thinks about DNS-over-http (and QUIC absorbing everything TCP/IP in general if we let our browser cartel overlords have their way)

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#14

Post by sperwren » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 10:20 AM UTC

jbverschoor wrote: post #12

foobarian wrote: post #3

This was my favorite Q & A: > Tim Berners-Lee [inventor of the World Wide Web] and many others have called the design of the URL clumsy because we have host.domain— welcometothejungle.com—where it’s hierarchically going from lower to higher. And then we have the path component—/en/collections/behindthecode—which goes from higher to lower. We also use a mix of periods and slashes. So Berners-Lee proposed that domain/h…

In the past, many DNS servers were configured so you can execute an "ls" to list the subdomains Nowadays most have disabled that option.

Do you have any references for this functionality? I’ve never encountered something like that in the RFCs, or in any server.

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#15

Post by kaared » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 10:35 AM UTC

sperwren wrote: post #14

jbverschoor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, many DNS servers were configured so you can execute an "ls" to list the subdomains Nowadays most have disabled that option.

Do you have any references for this functionality? I’ve never encountered something like that in the RFCs, or in any server.

I believe you're referring to DNS zone transfer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_zone_transfer and https://serverfault.com/questions/890153/how-does-nslookup-l...).

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#16

Post by bullen » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 10:43 AM UTC

I host a DNS server in each of the HTTP app. server processes in my global hosting platform:

http://host.binarytask.com

That way I can maintain and guarantee 100% read uptime!

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#17

Post by sperwren » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

kaared wrote: post #15

sperwren wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any references for this functionality? I’ve never encountered something like that in the RFCs, or in any server.

I believe you're referring to DNS zone transfer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_zone_transfer and https://serverfault.com/questions/890153/how-does-nslookup-l... ).

So presumably nslookup -ls had some logic for finding the apex for a particular name, doing an AXFR and then filtering it to the the target name and below?

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#18

Post by tptacek » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 12:35 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #10

tptacek wrote: post #5

Regarding DNSSEC adoption, for US names: it's less than 2%, just in terms of raw signed domains. It's lower if you're looking at adoption among popular domains.

The article claims it’s about 50% globally. So if, as you say, the US only has 2%, is that an argument against DNSSEC? That an argumentum ad populum.

It's not about 50% globally. It's like 50% of .SE, which is itself less than 25% as large as .INFO. He's guessing, and he's wrong. That's the point of my comment. I don't care what you do with the observation; he brought it up, and he's way off.

(I don't think it's weird that he's way off; I'm not criticizing Mockapetris, just correcting the stat. But your vehemence demands a direct response from me, and I'll provide it.)

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#19

Post by waheoo » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 12:44 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #6

foobarian wrote: post #3

This was my favorite Q & A: > Tim Berners-Lee [inventor of the World Wide Web] and many others have called the design of the URL clumsy because we have host.domain— welcometothejungle.com—where it’s hierarchically going from lower to higher. And then we have the path component—/en/collections/behindthecode—which goes from higher to lower. We also use a mix of periods and slashes. So Berners-Lee proposed that domain/h…

I wonder if he considered that even under a domain/host/path format, an autocomplete could probably be designed to ignore the domain and search the host. Eg, if you're searching for com/welcometothejungle/en/collections/behindthecode, just start typing "welcometothejungle" and autocomplete will find that substring and return the full URL.

Solution in search of a problem.

Whats the issue with having the domain name, an essentially flat map from name to number, going from least general to most general, and a path, representing a file system tree, going from most general down its nodes to the most specific?

Is the argument they make up two parts of a url, and thus should behave the same way? Seems a bit superficial.

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#20

Post by teddyh » Sun, Jun 28, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #18

teddyh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article claims it’s about 50% globally. So if, as you say, the US only has 2%, is that an argument against DNSSEC? That an argumentum ad populum.

It's not about 50% globally. It's like 50% of .SE, which is itself less than 25% as large as .INFO. He's guessing, and he's wrong. That's the point of my comment. I don't care what you do with the observation; he brought it up, and he's way off. (I don't think it's weird that he's way off; I'm not criticizing Mockapetris, just correcting the stat. But your vehemence demands a direct response from me, and I'll provide…

I don’t know what you mean by “vehemence”, but I note that even though you said it “demands a direct reponse”, you didn’t actually answer the question.