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Why is DNS still hard to learn?

jvns.ca

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Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#41

Post by dgb23 »

laserbeam wrote: post #21

Here's what's cool about the article: - Presents some nice theories which make things hard to learn (infrequent use, poor tools...) - Describes how DNS tools could be improved. - Gives you a few gotchas for how one may shoot themselves in a foot with DNS. Here's what's a bit (not much) less cool: - I really have no clue if those things ACTUALLY make things hard to learn (because it's not a research paper on learning)…

As for the last point: Check out the author’s blog. She’s a real hacker and can convey technical things in friendly and simple terms.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#42

Post by 1bent »

djbdns is simple, easy to understand, easy to configure; it embodies a clear understanding of how DNS works.

Unlike BIND and dig, it was designed after DNS had been in use for a while.

Like sendmail, BIND suffers from being designed before anyone knew what it would need to do.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#43

Post by jeroenhd »

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 think they'll have a much better time configuring a working DNS server. I don't know a good modern DNS client, so I've learned to deal with Dig instead. As a user of the "--color" flag for the `ip` command, I'd love to see tools like dig produce more modern output (I'll alias the command line flags, just add it to the command!)

Seriously, "MSG SIZE rcvd: 71" did not need abbreviation. "flags: qr rd ra" could've been full words as well. I don't know what the semicolons before the lines are supposed to convey but they're only making things confusing.

I find it no wonder people get confused learning DNS with the materials provided to them.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#44

Post by Spivak »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #31
monksy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to add on to what you're saying: > I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now. I've noticed it's become much worse since universities have been teaching Python to start with and with the whole aggressive comodization of developers. To some extent the social justice polices inacted in our communities to exclude peo…

I may agree with your point but don't understand the social justice aspect at all; makes it feel like it's something just added in. I think both our perspective as a society and thereforo educational goals have changed over decades, laterally to any social justice aspect. If nothing else, there are order of magnitude more developers of all sorts today than 25 years ago, both as absolute numbers and as relative percen…

And when there is social justice or involved it's about getting more people involved in engineering. I can see where "hey, quit being gross to women" can be read as excluding the unsavory but that framing presumes that a world where that's an intrinsic immutable property of a person.

I really don't buy the "some people just can't help being an asshole so having a rule against assholes is exclusionary." The most controversial CoC is by far the Contributor Covenant and rules are be kind and empathetic, show others respect, don't insult or demean others, don't be creepy or sexually harass others, don't doxx people, and behave like adults at work. Like the bar is so low.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#45

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

monksy wrote: post #27
shon wrote: post #2

It’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…

I just wanted to add on to what you're saying: > I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now. I've noticed it's become much worse since universities have been teaching Python to start with and with the whole aggressive comodization of developers. To some extent the social justice polices inacted in our communities to exclude peo…

I don't know, I would be curious to meet out of school dev from 20 years ago. Those I meet at my current job are... young. The lack of experience shows.

I guess at the time I was not better. Different, because using C I could still destroy hardware. Hard to program a CGA card from Python :D Maybe with MicroPython on an arduino now?

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#46

Post by fps »

redeeman wrote: post #34
shon wrote: post #2

It’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…

> 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 You remember things differently than I

in the very early 2000s, home routers weren't a thing. Cable modems hooked up to a single computer. If you were a business, you got a PIX, but home setups were frequently done with a computer that had 2 ethernet ports and either used Windows's "home internet sharing" or Linux's ipchains and NAT. This was typically fine, because very few houses had multiple computers. I knew many people who would get a separate cable modem for each computer in their house.

By the mid 2000s, Linksys started coming out with their little WRT routers, which were affordable by home users and mostly just plug and play.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#48

Post by gjvc »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #22
shon wrote: post #2

It’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…

Re/ knowing older protocols, I recently took a few weeks to read _Networking for System Administrators_ and take+review copious Anki card notes. It's incredible just how much more confident I feel around understanding networking at a high level, including both DNS and all the stuff underneath it, like `ethtool` and Ethernet frames and stuff. I suppose this isn't surprising, since knowing things "from the ground up" i…

20 years after doing a CS degree, I wish I had done EE instead.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#49

Post by iAm25626 »

I used to specialized in these service enable services. DHCP/DNS/AAA/LDAP and etc; low level stuff tend to get take for granted. It's not difficult but there are much nuances. Not typical visible to layer7/Front end development per se. Embrace the "and". If you are a FE/BE dev AND understand system/dns/network. You just set yourself apart from the next person.

Re: Why is DNS still hard to learn?

#50

Post by dgb23 »

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.
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