Why is DNS still hard to learn?
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Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?
#2It’s not. It’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed much and it’s operation is fairly straightforward.
dig is a little confusing. It’s more capable but less straightforward than good old nslookup (which still works fine BTW).
I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now.
For example, today wifi routers “just work” right out of the box. In the early 2000s it would have taken a network engineer with knowledge of DNS, IP, Ethernet, RFC1918, actual routing protocols and whole bunch of other stuff to set something like that up and they’d have well known how it worked and why it was configured the way it was.
If you think DNS from a client can perspective is confusing, try configuring BIND ;-)
/OldNeckBeardRant
Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?
#3I found out about https://www.nslookup.io/learning/ recently, which greatly increased my knowledge of DNS. If you look at the list of DNS record types [0], you might be surprised at how many their are. Knowing how to use those can be a bit much.
Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?
#4Shameless side project plug: they mention a "debug" mode for dns resolving being nice to have. ComfyDNS has this in its web UI :3
It's the picture that says "TRACE google.com A IN" at the top.
ComfyDNS is partly scratching a personal itch - I was tired of hand modifying bind9 zone files. And also I was curious as to how DNS works - I knew surface level stuff but no details. So I implemented the RFC from "scratch" (I used netty but no DNS libs). It was a lot of fun.
(Also if/when the site goes down from hugging, forgive me, it is a rails app running on the oracle cloud free tier lol)
Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?
#5the joke i've always heard is DNS combines 2 of the hardest problems in CS:
naming things and cache invalidation
Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?
#6the joke i've always heard is DNS combines 2 of the hardest problems in CS: naming things and cache invalidation
you forgot the second, off-by-one errors.
Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?
#7It’s not. It’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed much and it’s operation is fairly straightforward. dig is a little confusing. It’s more capable but less straightforward than good old nslookup (which still works fine BTW). I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now. For example, today wifi routers “just work” right out…
Yeah, BIND is hard to configure. Unbound/nsd are so much easier to deal with (once you find the correct documentation which is an exercice in frustration)
The principle behind DNS are not that hard, once you understand it's recursive. Now to configure it with security in mind, the proper infrastructure and the final details... lot of things to learn, but not that hard. Without BIND I mean.
Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?
#8Non-issue
Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?
#9It’s not. It’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed much and it’s operation is fairly straightforward. dig is a little confusing. It’s more capable but less straightforward than good old nslookup (which still works fine BTW). I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now. For example, today wifi routers “just work” right out…
Many modern APIs are more ergonomic and easier to use due to the benefits of hindsight. A redesign and upgrade of DNS is long overdue.
Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?
#10I found out about https://www.nslookup.io/learning/ recently, which greatly increased my knowledge of DNS. If you look at the list of DNS record types [0], you might be surprised at how many their are. Knowing how to use those can be a bit much. [0] https://www.nslookup.io/learning/dns-record-types/
> the list of DNS record types
Actually authoritative list: https://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-paramete...> That list also has linked references for each entry, whereas the list you gave only has references for 9 of the 51 types it lists.
If we exclude entries explictly marked as experimental, obsolete, deprecated, or reserved, the list you gave is still missing these:
• AMTRELAY
• ATMA
• AVC
• DOA
• EID
• GPOS
• ISDN
• L32
• L64
• LP
• MINFO
• NID
• NIMLOC
• NINFO
• PX
• RKEY
• RT
• SINK
• SPF
• TALINK
• WKS
• X25
(I know, many of these are de-facto deprecated: SPF is abandoned for TXT, GPOS was replaced by LOC, and the entire usage of WKS was obsoleted by the recommendation of RFC 1123. But they are not marked as such in the list from IANA, and I still often see SPF records in the wild.)
Also incomplete, but often has better references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DNS_record_types>
(Not to mention TYPE, which I have also occasionally encountered.)