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Why is DNS still hard to learn?

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Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#131

Post by chasd00 »

i hate to be that guy but it's not hard to learn. The tools are just from a different era where expectations where... different. However, even in my day BIND was avoided in favor of other servers like that one by the qmail guy.. can't remember his name.

this comment reminds me of one of my favorite Dilberts

old guy watching Dilbert at his computer: you kids today and your fancy graphical user interfaces. Back in my day all we had were ones and zeros ...and sometimes we didn't even have ones.

Dilbert: you had zeros? we had to use the letter 'o'

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#132

Post by bombcar »

jeroenhd wrote: post #74
j16sdiz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BIND expose (almost) every details of DNS. That's why learning their config would teach you 90% of the DNS system. dig output make sense after reading the RFC. It exposes every bit flag in the protocol level

I have read the RFC. I just don't mess with DNS often enough that I know all the RFC definitions from the top of my head, and I don't want to need to find the appropriate RFC(s) every time I want to debug an issue. It's not as if tools like wget bother you with http/3 spec fields every time you download something from the internet unless you explicitly ask for them, and even if they do, they're more descriptive than…

>I just don't mess with DNS often enough

That's the root of all this, we only deal with DNS when something breaks, and it rarely breaks.

If we did DNS all day every day it'd all be super clear and concise.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#133

Post by dahfizz »

chefandy wrote: post #56
jeroenhd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is hard to learn... using the tools people used to learn DNS with. BIND is great at what it does, but its configuration files suck and its manual is long, terse, and unnecessarily complex sometimes. Dig is powerful, but abbreviates everything like we're on an 80 column terminal. At times Wireshark was a better tool debugging DNS issues than Dig was. Give someone PowerDNS or another modern DNS server and I…

I'd conservatively estimate 90% of the people who make core FOSS software interface decisions haven't had to learn anything technical in an entirely unfamiliar domain where there existing mental models didn't apply in decades. Beyond that, many consider having learned these arbitrary, terse interfaces as a badge of honor, and for some reason thinks that makes them better technologists. I'll bet they'd be even better…

I disagree.

The CLI is inherently a super-user oriented interface. The CLI needs to let an experienced user be as productive as possible.

If you need a pretty UI with everything spelled out, you should go on GitHub and find a GUI that someone built on top of the core tool. But dumbing down the core tool is not the way to go.

The --help message should be good, and the man page needs to be good, but the tool itself should favor power and productivity over handholding someone who doesn't want to Google a how-to.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#135

Post by chasd00 »

dgb23 wrote: post #50
gunapologist99 wrote: post #26

It's probably a good idea for all IT people to have a working knowledge of how to debug DNS issues. DNS has historically been a vector for significant security holes and it's likely that this will continue to be true for the indefinite future. These holes also lead to other vectors in nearly every other protocol like SMTP. Even the CA system used for HTTPS is highly dependent on a basically insecure protocol. (Would…

It seems to me that everything which broadcasts/asserts routing decisions in a network (any layer) is deceptively simple and potentially dangerous.

> deceptively simple and potentially dangerous

Also, there's not a lot of people keeping the whole thing running. iirc there's only like 13 or 14 root DNS servers on earth.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#137

Post by pests »

redundantly wrote: post #104
tux1968 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dig google.com | grep -v '^;' | grep . | awk '{ print $5 }'` It wasn't really your point, but hopefully you'll forgive me sharing an equivalent one-liner, without grep: dig google.com | awk '/./ && !/^;/ {print $5}'

I believe both you and the parent meant to escape the dot, as to only return lines with a dot in them: dig example.com | awk '/\./ && !/^;/ {print $5}' If it isn't escaped it'll just match on everything. If matching everything was intended then you don't need it at all: dig example.com | awk '!/^;/ {print $5}' Will strip out the lines beginning with a semi-colon. However, parsing the output of `dig` this way is not n…

Remind me again where this weird syntax came from for passing arguments?

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#138

Post by manuel_w »

jeroenhd wrote: post #43
tristor wrote: post #30

I don't agree with this article. I think DNS is something few people take the time to learn, but it's not actually hard to learn. One of the great things about DNS is that the system itself will tell you about it's internal state in response to queries. It's very easy to inspect a DNS server for a known zone and understand how it works, and there's very good tooling that's free and widely available to do this (like d…

I think it is hard to learn... using the tools people used to learn DNS with. BIND is great at what it does, but its configuration files suck and its manual is long, terse, and unnecessarily complex sometimes. Dig is powerful, but abbreviates everything like we're on an 80 column terminal. At times Wireshark was a better tool debugging DNS issues than Dig was. Give someone PowerDNS or another modern DNS server and I…

  $ ip address --color
  Command "--color" is unknown, try "ip address help".

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#139

Post by matteotom »

manuel_w wrote: post #138
jeroenhd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is hard to learn... using the tools people used to learn DNS with. BIND is great at what it does, but its configuration files suck and its manual is long, terse, and unnecessarily complex sometimes. Dig is powerful, but abbreviates everything like we're on an 80 column terminal. At times Wireshark was a better tool debugging DNS issues than Dig was. Give someone PowerDNS or another modern DNS server and I…

$ ip address --color Command "--color" is unknown, try "ip address help".

try

> ip --color address

otherwise you might just have an old version

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#140

Post by dataflow »

jeroenhd wrote: post #43
tristor wrote: post #30

I don't agree with this article. I think DNS is something few people take the time to learn, but it's not actually hard to learn. One of the great things about DNS is that the system itself will tell you about it's internal state in response to queries. It's very easy to inspect a DNS server for a known zone and understand how it works, and there's very good tooling that's free and widely available to do this (like d…

I think it is hard to learn... using the tools people used to learn DNS with. BIND is great at what it does, but its configuration files suck and its manual is long, terse, and unnecessarily complex sometimes. Dig is powerful, but abbreviates everything like we're on an 80 column terminal. At times Wireshark was a better tool debugging DNS issues than Dig was. Give someone PowerDNS or another modern DNS server and I…

To the extent I learned DNS, it was via nslookup, definitely not dig.
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